The Metaphysics of Paintings and Their Perfect Copies: Theory and Practice

The mere possibility of visually indistinguishable copies of paintings has been a longstanding source of debate for ontologists of art. Philosophers including Strawson (1974), Currie (1989), and Zemach (1986) have used this possibility to argue in favour of the ontological multiplicity, or repeatability of visual art kinds, including painting. On their view, paintings can be instantiated by numerous concrete particulars. The fact that traditional practices traditionally treat paintings as singular objects is merely a contingent fact dependent on our technological ability to reproduce painted canvases at the required level of visual indistinguishability. Others reject this claim. Levinson (1987, 1996) maintains that the art practice treatment of paintings as singular objects is too fundamental to be rejected. However, visually indistinguishable copies are now realisable in the form of what I term “suitable facsimiles”. The question of whether their existence, and practical treatment, challenges the traditional ontological status of paintings as singular must be addressed.
This ontological question provides a natural and philosophically rich starting point for understanding the relationship between suitable facsimiles and painting. After evaluating various accounts which identify paintings as repeatable, I argue that the special treatment given to suitable facsimiles can and should be attributed to their unique epistemic rather than ontological relationship to the originals. I modify Walton’s (1984) account of photographic transparency to argue that suitable facsimiles provide a genuine kind of perceptual access to the paintings they copy, and that it is this access that explains why they can best be treated as stand-ins for the originals. I then use my epistemic proposal to consider whether the way suitable facsimiles have been understood and used in facilitating the return of culturally contested artworks and artefacts should be modified. In doing this, I draw attention to a necessary interplay between philosophy and practice.