the disowning of an artwork

Recently i attended a philosophy colloquia, and during one of the discussion sessions the topic of the disowning artwork came up. there are so many questions that came to my mind. so perhaps the most succinct way of doing this is to go through them one by one:

why would an artist disown his or her work?

simply put artists may feel that the work did not express their vision; it was not successful in its execution; it was not emblematic of their overall project or theme; or, in their mind it sucks. i think that there are any number of reasons why an artist might disown his or her work. some are complex and some are simple, some might be selfish and some might be out of a desire to "better the world of art". this, however, is not the critical question.

what happens (to the artwork) if the artist disowns it? [also: is the word of the artist law? that is, does their disavowal thereby change the ontological status of the artwork?]

it is best to begin with the uncontroversial claim that all artwork needs an author; artwork does not simply appear, no artwork can suddenly come into existence ex nihlo without having an artist that created it. granted this, let us assume that the artist creates two artworks . Let us also assume that are prints in an edition (i am sticking with the example used by Christy MagUihdir). at some point after have been created the artist decides (for whatever reason) to disown x. so at t1 x is created; at t2 y is created; at tn x is disowned. one further assumption is that at t1 x is an artwork and at t2 y is an artwork. so at tn, when x is disowned by the artist—who might say something insightful such as, "i disown x. i do not want x to be displayed in galleries, nor viewed by anyone at any time. i severe all ties to x, and people should assume that x has no connection with me or my work"; or the artist could crassly state, "that [x] isn't mine"—what becomes of its status as an artwork? does it cease to be one? as we said before, all art needs an artist, but at tn, for all intents and purposes, x has no artist, so x cannot be an artwork. imagine instead that at t3 the artist dies; now have no artist, so should we say that are not an artwork at tn? No—just because the artist is no longer alive does not negate the status of the artwork. if it did then every "artwork" in any gallery that was made by a now deceased artist could no longer be an artwork. the above scenario misrepresents what is meant by an artwork "needing" an artist: all that is required is that, at some point in the causal chain of the creation of an artwork, an artist was involved. put simply all we need for an artwork to be an artwork is that there was an artist. if there was, then the subsequent death of the artist will not affect the status of an artwork. 

but if the death of an artist does not negate the status of an artwork how can an artwork lose its "artwork" status through the artist's verbal act of "i take it back"? here two strands must be teased apart: the aesthetic and the ontological. if the artwork is an artwork it will, presumably, display certain aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. if it displays any of the former, we (i.e., philosophers, i.e., academically trained nit-pickers) will be hard pressed to tell "Joe-six pack" (sorry couldn't resist the Sarah Palin tick) that what was a work of art is now, not. now it is; now it isn't. simple because that guy said so (and does it matter the reason?). if x has aesthetic properties, even after the artist disowns it, i want to say that x is still an artwork. the other strand is more tricky. here we must decide, or at least come to an agreement on the rules for, who has the power to convey "artworkhood" on some object. if we agree that it is the artist who can confer "artworkhood" then it would be, at least without justification, arbitrary to say that the artist does not also have the power to take away "artworkhood". once something is an artwork, and thus displays aesthetic properties—lets grant that x counts as an artwork if anything counts as an artwork—the artist saying "this is not an artwork. i don't want it shown or sold" does not negate the aesthetic properties seen in the artwork. think of what would happen if we said that x wasn't an artwork: the artist disowns x at tn, but x still displays aesthetic properties—"x is beautiful" or "x's use of Ω (e.g., line, texture, color, tone) creates a feeling of balance". in this example a non-artwork is seen as embodying distinctly aesthetic properties, and it might not seem so outlandish if x were a natural object displaying aesthetic properties (e.g., a landscape, a sunset, etc.), but here there is an object that was created specifically as an artwork (to heighten the case we might flush out the details of what kind of artwork x is, e.g., a realistic portrait of a woman sitting next to an open window) but now has been stripped of its status of artwork. nothing has changed in its appearance; we are able to see the same brushstrokes, the same use of tone, color, line and composition, the same relationship of elements. so, what has changed?

by disowning the artwork the only thing the artist has managed to do is to severe the artwork from him—the artwork is no longer "an A" (where "A" can be filled in with the artist's name, much as we do when we say, "that is a Rembrandt" or "that reminds me of a Chuck Close"). but, i want to maintain that the artwork does not lose its status as an artwork. if the artist created an artwork (i haven't discussed the conditions required for creating art, but we can grant that some such conditions exist), and it fulfills the conditions (generally accepted by critics and the public) for what counts as a piece of art, in disowning the piece of art all that the artist does is re-create the artwork into an "artist-less" artwork. we can describe it as "a former A" or "an artwork that used to be an A" or (more humorously) "the x formerly made by A". in the end the only way that an artwork could completely lose its status of art might arise from some major shift in the conventions of an era such that the characteristics displayed by x no longer fulfill the conditions for its inclusion as an artwork. perhaps this hypothetical scenario is not so far fetched though—different eras of art have surely looked with distain at previous styles that had come to be considered as vile, inartistic, inappropriate, etc. whether whole styles of art really did cease to embody any visible aesthetic properties is doubtful, and a better account is that the prejudices of individuals influenced the exclusion of certain individual works and, perhaps, whole styles.

this has lead us away from the topic at hand. can an artwork be disowned? Yes—but only if we understand the act of disowning to be a severing of an artwork with an artist. its is not possible to severe an artwork from what i have called "artworkhood" except under certain extreme conditions. of course this discussion has focused on the plastic arts to the exclusion of, for example, music, and i am unsure how my account would impact these other areas. 

(for a recent example of this issue check out Edward Winkleman's blog entry about Richard Prince's decision to disown some of his earlier non-representational work)