ABSTRACT
People have argued that the move from supercopy to universal multiplicity is insufficiently motivated. One common avenue of response takes its cue from their attitudes towards forgeries, where our preference for the original seems rooted in its causal origins rather than just its aesthetic properties. One might then use the artist’s sanction as a means of filling out what counts as a work’s provenential instances and insist that these alone are proper instances of the work. On this view, people take their ontological cues from their artworld practices, which are quite diverse, and leave it to artists to determine a work’s proper ontological category. This is not just a matter of simply intending that a work be singular or multiple, however: the artist must take some steps to secure that status for the work, to guide the public’s reaction to it, and sometimes they may well fail.
