Abstract
Many authors have defined artworks as artifacts, objects intentionally manufactured or modified for a certain purpose. Here, artworks are not physical things, but external semiotic processes (semioses). Treating artworks as signs-in-action suggests that their ontology has to account for semiotic properties, such as temporal distribution, future-orientedness, emergence, self-organization, and distributed agency. We examine authorship of artworks from a process semiotics perspective. This implies a spatiotemporally distributed notion of authorship. Authorship itself can be viewed as a distributed and external legisign-in-action, which is irreducible to particular events and properties of individual subjects. An author is not a causal originator of authorship, but a locus of the action of the authorship sign. Strict application of Peirce’s triadic model of semiosis should modify the ontological status of hypothetical entities such as “author”, “artifact”, “intention”, “artwork”, reorganizing the metaphysical picture of the phenomenon in terms of temporally-distributed, emergent and self-organized processes.
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Notes
- 1.
We follow the practice of citing from the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1935, 1958) by volume number and paragraph number, preceded by CP; the Essential Peirce, by volume number and page number, preceded by EP. References to the Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (1967) will be indicated by MS, followed by the manuscript number and pages.
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Queiroz, J., Atã, P. (2022). Artwork Authorship as a Sign-in-Action. In: McNamara, P., Jones, A.J.I., Brown, M.A. (eds) Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen. Synthese Library, vol 454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90749-5_11
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