The main aim of the workshop is to explore the philosophical foundations of artistic rights along three main axes: (i) the nature of artistic authorship and the artist-work relationship; (ii) the role of the artist’s authority in artistic creation and work completion; (iii) the ontological and normative foundations of the artist’s authority in connection to social values.

This is a two-day workshop (16-17th December) taking place at Edificio de Humanidades UNED – Sala B, from 10am to 7pm.

 

Invited Speakers

Marta Benenti – Marie Curie Researcher. University of Bergamo/Murcia, Spain.

Julian Dodd – Professor. University of Leeds, UK

Victor Durà Vilà – Lecturer. University of Leeds, UK

Lisa Giombini – Lecturer. University of Roma Tre, Italy.

Sophie Keeling – Ramón y Cajal Fellow. UNED, Madrid

Justine Pila – Professor. University of Oxford, UK .

Enrico Terrone – Professor. Università di Genova, Italy

Nicholas Wiltsher – Senior Lecturer. Uppsala University, Sweden

Mark Windsor – Marie Curie Research Fellow. Uppsala University, Sweden

Max Wong – PhD Student. University of Oxford, UK 

 

Organisers: project The Gounds of Artistic Rights and the Limits of Appropriation (PID2023-147445NA-I00) with the suppoort of the British Society of Aesthetics.

• Paloma Atencia-Linares (Associate Professor UNED) 
• Nemesio García-Carril Puy (Ramón y Cajal Fellow. Complutense University of Madrid)

Organisers assistants: Sergio Añón Lijó (Complutense University), Ramón Carnota Méndez (UNED), Carlos Ibáñez García (Complutense University).

 

ABSTRACTS

Screenwriting and the quest for authorship

Marta Benenti | University of Bergamo

In the las few years, especially in the world's most powerful and developed film industry, Hollywood, screenwriters have seen their status as workers threatened by increasingly inadequate pay conditions. This lack of economic recognition is often seen as reflecting a general understatement of the artistic importance of screenwriting. Against the background of this demand for social recognition, in this talk, I will try to elaborate on authorship and screenwriting. First, I will introduce two competing theories of screenwriting, the narrative-independent approach (Nannicelli 2013) and the narrative-oriented view (Terrone 2023). After endorsing this latter perspective, according to which we should define screenplay based the norms that govern its creation, I will explore the hypothesis that the nature of screenplays is akin to that of architectural plans (Nannicelli 2011) and see what this entails when it comes to the ascription of authorship to screenwriters (Koch 2000; Meskin 2008; Gaut 2009). I will suggest that, while the norms that are constitutive of the practice of screenwriting prevent from ascribing films authorship to screenwriters, a duly developed notion of agency not only may allow writers to be credited (and given responsibility for their creative contribution), but can help substantiate the appeals to collective authorship (Davies 2023) at least for some recent audiovisual products such as tv series.

 

Work-Satisfactionism: A Non-Psychological Account of Artwork Completeness

Julian Dodd and Nemesio García-Carril Puy | Leeds & UCM

What is it for an artwork to be finished? As Guy Rohrbaugh observes, most philosophers of art presume that the right answer to this question is some version or other of psychologism: the view that an artwork’s being finished (or, as is sometimes said, “complete”) consists entirely in the obtaining of facts about the psychology of its artist or artists. We reject Rohrbaugh’s proposed diagnosis of what is wrong with psychologism, replacing it with something more convincing. We consider his own positive non-psychological proposal, which we call “plan-satisfactionism”: the view that a work is complete just if it fulfils the artist’s plan. In our view, plan-satisfactionism fails to accord with the correct diagnosis of psychologism’s flaws and, as a result, should be replaced with a version of non-psychologism that does better justice to the concept of completion implicit in our critical and appreciative practice. This version, which we call “work-satisfactionism”, says that the standard for a work’s completeness is supplied, not by the artist’s plan for it, but, as the creative process unfolds, by the work itself.

 

Restoring Authorship: Restoration, Co-Authorship, and the Ontology of the Artwork

Lisa Giombini | Roma Trè

Art restoration forces us to confront one of the most ambiguous and neglected forms of multiple authorship. When a painting or sculpture is cleaned, retouched, or structurally repaired, new hands act directly upon the material object that once embodied another’s expressive act, but do they also act upon the work? And do they thereby participate in the authorship of the work itself? Such cases unsettle the foundations of moral and intellectual rights that presuppose a singular creative origin. Drawing on recent philosophical accounts of co-authorship, this paper examines restoration as a test case for competing theories of artistic agency. Through contentious examples such as the Ghent Altarpiece and Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn – works whose current appearance results from centuries of repainting, recolouring, and removal – I argue that restorers frequently satisfy established criteria for co-authorship. As Livingston (2005), Sellors (2007), and Bacharach and Tollefsen (2010) each suggest, authorship can arise through intentional, causal, and collaborative relations among contributors. Restorers occupy an ambiguous but central position within this framework: they intentionally engage with an inherited work, exercise causal control over its perceptible form, and continue another’s expressive project through interpretive and material decisions. Hick’s (2017) addition of “institutional recognition” explains why this status is rarely acknowledged, yet such exclusion is not ontologically decisive; it is a historical product of the very moral-rights system under discussion, sustaining the fiction of solitary authorship. Recognizing restorers as co-authors thus reveals the layered, temporally distributed nature of artistic agency and the fragility of the category of “the artist” itself, even for the revered art of the past.

 

Standpoints and spect-actors: The epistemology of participatory theatre

Sophie Keeling | UNED

This paper will argue for the importance of giving artistic voice to oppressed groups themselves as opposed to only relying on professional artists to produce works based on their experiences. It will focus on ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ (ToO), which was first developed in the 1970s by Augusto Boal and is now used in various contexts. ToO is a participatory theatre practice that gives oppressed groups theatrical tools to explore their experiences and promote social and legislative change. This paper will analyse ToO through a social epistemological lens to better understand its value and raise a number of points of interest for epistemologists. First, I will argue that this practice helps meet oppressed subjects’ ‘right to be known’, as discussed by Jennifer Lackey. And further, I will discuss the potential for generating new knowledge of oppression throughout the artistic process. In particular, through the inclusion of non-verbal techniques, ToO helps subjects to gain important knowledge that couldn’t be acquired by professional artists alone. A further upshot of this paper is a broader understanding of the relationship between theatre and knowledge, to see theatre as a way of creating knowledge and conceptual understanding, and not just transmitting it.

 

The Double Character of Authorial Works - A Case for Moral Rights

Justine Pila | University of Oxford

The existence and legal recognition of authors’ moral rights are generally ascribed to a conception of works as extensions of their creator’s personality. In this paper, I will argue that implicit in the Hegelian conception of works as externalizations of their creator is a view of works as intentional expressive artefacts which claim a certain autonomy essential for their recognition and perception as such; and that this view is supported by an analysis of work-creation and work-publication respectively, including the illocutionary acts which each entails and their deontic effects. The resulting analysis, I suggest, provides the basis for a persuasive justificatory case for the recognition of moral rights from the value of personhood, which in turn provides the appropriate reference point for any system of parallel legal rights, as well as the interpretation of constitutional principles of freedom of art."

 

Creation, Production, Invention.  Authorship as a Challenge to the Unification of Art and Technology 

Enrico Terrone | Università di Genova

Technical monism holds that works of art and technical artefacts share a unified ontological status (Franda & Souleman 2025). A powerful objection appeals to artistic authorship, which appears to mark an ontological divide between the creation of artworks and the mere production of technical artefacts. As Susanne Langer (1957, 27) puts it, “We don’t create bricks, aluminium pots, or toothpaste; we simply make such things. But we create works of art.” I defend technical monism against this objection. My key move is to reject any version of technical monism according to which artistic creation must be a species of technical production. Instead, artistic creation is better understood as a species of technical invention (cf. Houkes 2022). On this more promising variant of technical monism, artists are inventors of artefacts that have distinctive experiential functions that specify success conditions in terms of patterns of experience. This preserves the ontological unification of art and technology without denying the intuitive gap between creation and production: the gap is bridged by invention. 

 

Creation as a speech act

Nicholas Wiltsher | University of St Andrews

I’ll examine the credentials of the view that artistic creation is a speech act. “Examine the credentials” is a weaselly phrase, used here because I genuinely don’t know at this point whether or not I wish to subscribe to the view. I’ll attempt to ferret out the best arguments for and against it, with the aim of provoking fruitful discussion of their merits—though it’s totally possible that I’ll have reached a more decisive position already by the time I’m done talking.

 

Artistic Authorship: One Moment, Not Two

Mark Windsor | Uppsala University

What grounds artists’ moral rights over their works? The answer, one would expect, will be found in the relationship they have to their works as authors or creators. Typically, authors of artworks are understood (roughly) as the individuals who intentionally produce artworks and take responsibility for their artistically relevant features. Recently, however, Karen Gover has proposed a ‘dual-intention’ theory of artistic authorship, according to which artistic authorship comprises two, logically independent intentional moments: a generative moment, in which an artist produces a work, and an evaluative moment, in which she ratifies the work as ‘hers’. On Gover’s account, the second, evaluative moment is what grounds artists’ moral rights. In this paper, I argue against Gover that artistic authorship logically comprises one intentional moment, not two. First, I argue that the intentional production of artworks, in so far as it is constitutive of authorship, is always sensitive to evaluative concerns and cannot ‘merely’ be generative. Second, I argue that this generative-evaluative intentional moment of artistic creation is sufficient for artistic authorship. Third, I argue that this is what grounds artists’ moral rights. Finally, I suggest what might make artistic authorship special in this regard in contrast to other forms of authorship.  

 

Effects of ambiguous musical ontology in copyright litigation

Max H.Y. Wong | University of Oxford

The definition of a “musical work” in UK law is problematic. It is provided by section 3(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. “Musical work” means a work consisting of music, exclusive of any words or action intended to be sung, spoken or performed with the music. This definition may be seen as circular, as it relies on “music”, which is itself problematic to define. The difficulty is compounded by the requirement that it excludes anything “performed with the music”. In other words, it requires us to consider the impossible: music without performance. This paper illustrates the effects of this problematic definition in copyright litigation through several case examples. Particularly, the natural inclination for courts to consider evidence in written form privileges musical ontologies based on written representations of sounds. Inadvertently, this shifts the situs of litigation from the music itself to the forensic analysis of written representations of music. Although as a philosophical matter the ontology of music may arguably be an intractable question, the law will benefit from further research to provide a functional ontology of music to assist better legislation and legal determination.