Multiple Artworks as Historical Types

Catharine Abell (University of Oxford)

Some artworks are singular, while others are multiple. Paintings, drawings and carved sculptures can have only one instance, while plays, photographs, works of music and literature, etchings and cast sculptures can have many instances. Whatever kinds of things one takes singular artworks to be, a type ontology of multiple artworks is appealing. Types are genuinely repeatable entities that can be tokened multiple times. However, the price for this neat way of explaining the repeatability of multiple artworks seems high. If multiple artworks are types, they cannot have many of the properties that we commonly ascribe to them.    My aim in this paper is to defend a type ontology of multiple artworks against common criticisms. I will argue that multiple artworks are historical types. That is, the various tokens of a multiple artwork are bound together by their shared causal history.