Workshop on authorship, creation, and normativity
This is a two-day workshop (16-17th December) taking place at Edificio de Humanidades UNED – Sala B, from 10am to 7pm. More information on the schedule and details will be published soon.
The Topic(s) of the Workshop:
Artworks seem to be a peculiar kind of artifacts in that their authors deserve special rights over them. In contrast to ordinary, non-artistic artifacts such as pens or tables, ownership does not grant the right to freely modify, destroy or use them. Artistic rights, which typically encompass an artist’s moral and intellectual property rights, confer a special authority to the artist. This authority is taken to be grounded in the subject matter of authorship theories, namely, the relationship that holds between the artist and her work.
Recent phenomena, like the emergence of AI in creative processes, the identification of gender asymmetries in artistic authority, a new consciousness for ownership and protection of cultural beings related to underrepresented groups, or even the perception of inequality in wealth distribution promoted by intellectual property regimes, may threaten traditional views on artistic rights and motivate a new reflection on these matters. 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. Relevant topics connected to these lines are the following:
1. What is the nature of artistic authorship and the relationship between a work and its artist? Is this nature being altered by the introduction of AI in artistic practice?
2. Are there alternative accounts of work-completion that may help to explain the nature of a special bond between work and artist?
3. Does the idea of the special bond rely on a plausible view of artistic creation?
4. Is the ground of artistic rights the relationship between work and artist? Is this a valuable relation in itself?
5. Do artists’ special rights have an ontological foundation in the author-work relationship, or are their grounds of a purely normative nature, either concerning the value of the work itself or other social values?
Organisers
- Paloma Atencia-Linares (Associate Professor UNED)
- Nemesio García-Carril Puy (Ramón y Cajal Fellow. Complutense University of Madrid)
Invited Speakers
Marta Benenti – Marie Curie Researcher. Universidad de Murcia, Spain.
Chiara Brozzo – Assistant Professor. University of Birmingham, UK
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