LanCog seminar and Clepsydra group: Nemesio Puy on artistic rights and authenticity

“On the Grounds of Artistic Rights”

Nemesio Puy (Complutense University of Madrid)

27 November 2025, 15:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon

Room B112.B

 

Abstract: “Artworks are taken to be a special kind of artifacts: their authors deserve some special rights over them that are not typically given to the authors of other kinds of artifacts. Known as the artist’s moral rights, they are assumed to be grounded in a special bond holding between the artwork and its author. A widespread explanation of this ground, both in legal and artistic contexts, is the Hegelian-romantic emotivist theory of authorship, which sees artworks as an extension of the artist’s personality. Trying to avoid the epistemic and metaphysical obscurities of this approach, alternative views of artistic authorship have been proposed in recent philosophical debate. However, all of them agree on a specific characterization of the alleged special bond between the artist and her work: they see the artwork is an intentional expression of its author. Assuming this framework, the fundamental question I will consider comes as follows: what makes the bond artist-work, characterized in those terms, so special as to be the justification of artists’ moral rights? I will argue that the special bond is neither valuable in itself nor in terms of other kinds of values, like irreplaceability, uniqueness and qualitative rarity. Alternatively, I will explore the possibility of the value of the special bond stemming from the value of its relata. The strategy of inheriting the bond’s value from seeing artists as a special kind of authors will be revealed as unfruitful as well. Consequently, the question about the value of the special bond will turn out to be a question about the value of artworks. An examination of this question will conclude that, only if artistic value is characterized as a final and intrinsic value, a normatively substantive ground for the special bond, and hence for artistic rights, can be found. A rejection of this approach would force us either to see artists’ moral rights as a groundless and unmotivated notion or to radically rethink the theories of artistic authorship.”

 

This is an in-person event. Admission is free.