Philosophy lecturer Dr Lee Walters has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (worth ?85,156) for 2016-17 to explore the nature of artworks.
Intuitively, we distinguish between art forms that have a single instance, for example paintings and carved sculpture, and repeatable art forms that have many instances, such as pieces of music and novels. Specifically, Lee’s work investigates the nature of repeatable artworks (RAs).
One tradition in philosophy treats RAs as strange, unstructured, eternal objects that are discovered by artists. The aim of Lee’s project is to instead argue that RAs are simply types of artefacts that are created, rather than discovered by, artists.
To do this, Lee is addressing four problems his argument faces:
- Why can some artworks be forged, but others not?
- When do some artworks come into existence; how are they related to the material world?
- How do such artworks change over time; what is the relation between these artworks and their different versions?
- Can we account for the structure of these artworks; how, for instance, can a single line repeated in a poem be a part of the same artwork twice?
The research results will be communicated through four journal articles, a conference, teaching, blog posts and a public ‘Culture Day’.
Thirty-five awards were made in 2016, with Lee being the only philosopher to receive one. You can view a full list of winners and their abstracts by clicking here.
