Nemesio Puy: "Artists’ moral rights and the relevance of artistic value"

Nemesio Puy, Complutense University of Madrid och University of Granada: "Artists’ moral rights and the relevance of artistic value"

Abstract
This paper aims to offer a plausible explanation of the following datum: artworks are taken to be a special kind of artifacts in that, unlike other artifacts, their authors deserve special rights over them. These are typically known as the author’s moral rights, and they are assumed to be grounded in a special bond between the work and its author. Based on Romantic roots, the doctrine of moral rights appeals to an emotivist theory of authorship to justify them, 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, but all of them agree on the following picture about the special bond between artist and work: the work is an intentional expression of its author. Accordingly, the fundamental question to be addressed is: what makes the bond artist - work, characterized in those terms, so special or valuable as to be the justification of artists’ moral rights?

As we shall see, the special bond is not valuable in itself, neither in terms of irreplaceability, nor uniqueness, nor qualitative rarity. We will be forced then to see the value of the special bond as 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 suggest that artistic value should be characterized as a value that is final and intrinsic. Accordingly, the bond artist - work is special because the artifacts involved have this kind of value. The conclusion will be that only artifacts with final intrinsic value deserve moral rights for their authors.