Variants of Concern: Authenticity, Conservation, and the Type-Token Distinction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last 20 years, the conservation literature around installation and performance artworks has increasingly relied on concepts and analogies from the philosophy of music to reformulate the concept of authenticity for artworks that recur in multiple instances. Within these frameworks, authenticity is often framed as a quality ascribed to a manifestation on the basis of its compliance with the artist’s explicit directives or a precision of formal resemblance with past manifestations. This article resituates the concept of authenticity invoked in fine art conservation within a wider discourse in analytic philosophy on the type-token distinction and artworks as abstract entities that are instantiated in time and space. Given the intersubjective nature and situatedness of authenticity judgements pertaining to a work’s manifestations, this article considers the limitations of authenticity frameworks predicated exclusively on score compliance and considers how a type-token ontology is more capacious. This article demonstrates how this distinction already underpins existing frameworks and discourses, how it aids in conceptualising the relationship between an artwork’s potentially multiple versions or variants and their manifestations, and how it accommodates the ways perceptions of an artwork’s identity are socially mediated through time and may differ across its viewership.