Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.

I argue that all that is relevant to appreciating art as art is the "abstract entity that is the work of art." The object of aesthetic contemplation, the bearer of aesthetic value, just is this abstract entity picked out by the sortal concept 'work of art,' which requires some vehicle but does not require the particular vehicle that is the original painting. Since this is so, the work of art is present in a visually-indistinguishable duplicate to the same extent and (...) to the same degree as it is in the original. To hedge my bets a little against those who are not persuaded by this strong claim, I also argue that, assuming there is a genuine value-relevant difference between an original and a duplicate, the duplicate could in principle share in or exceed the value of the original.. (shrink)

Although art forgery is documented throughout the history of Western art, philosophical discussion of the problems of art forgery is a relatively recent matter, beginning largely in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arising even more recently is the practice of creating ‘appropriation art’, a topic that has so far been largely ignored in aesthetics but which raises some challenging questions especially when compared with forgery. This article introduces some of the philosophical problems that arise from the practice and (...) products of art forgery and in the contemporary movement of art appropriation. Rather than involving issues on the periphery of aesthetics, I suggest, forgery and appropriation art cut to the heart of issues in the ontology of art, the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and other central areas in the philosophy of art. (shrink)