TY - JOUR
AU - BRAND, PEG ZEGLIN
AB - In this article I explore the concept of originality from several viewpoints. Within the world of printmaking, I show that while print dealers may draw attention to originality in order to enhance economic value, artists emphasize the aesthetic value of a work based on the freedom to express artistic intent and to experiment with techniques of the medium. Within the worlds of philosophy and to some extent, psychology, “originality” has been misleadingly tied to the notions of “creativity” and “genius,” thereby replicating a cultural bias that links an artist to particular mental processes that are unnecessarily exclusive. An experiential account of creativity like the one recently advanced by Bence Nanay not only disadvantages those artists whose lived experiences reflect fewer social opportunities than their counterparts, but also invokes a concept of luck that undermines the role of originality within an artwork's overall aesthetic value. We have created a great ogre for ourselves—originality. —Gabriel Austin,The Print Collector's Newsletter, 19721 Luck be a lady tonight. —Sung by Frank Sinatra; written by Frank Loesser, 19502 It is laudable to see “Printmaking and the Philosophy of Art” as a special topic of this journal issue since, as an artist, it can be disappointing to peruse the literature only to find that many individual mediums within visual art have not been of sustained interest to aestheticians.3 Whereas paintings represent the majority of artistic examples, photography and film have also been popular, perhaps because art viewers see them as more relevant in their current incarnations—that is, everyone sees movies and nearly everyone has taken photographs (even before cell phones). But printmaking involves an art‐making experience of a specialized and very deliberate sort: perhaps an undergraduate art class beyond the typical Drawing or Intro to Painting, or joining a local printmaking studio (if one exists nearby, such as Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico or in my case, Atelier 6000 in Bend, Oregon), or at the very least, taking that extra and expensive step of acquiring a press of one's own to make multiple works of art, painstakingly rendered into editions which are designed to be easily distributed and often sold at costs lower than prices set for paintings or other one‐of‐a‐kind works. Unfortunate for the medium is the opinion that holds, “Most artists rightly consider prints a poor man's painting … [or] the poor man's art.”4 A sensible retort is that good prints can be magnificent visual expressions in a variety of modes such as engraving, etching, lithography, and silkscreen; they embody technical skill and aesthetic insight—and sometimes they are even affordable! In this article I argue that (1) within the world of printmaking, print dealers may draw attention to originality in order to enhance economic value, while artists emphasize the aesthetic value of the work based on the freedom to express artistic intent and to experiment with techniques of the medium; (2) within the worlds of philosophy and to some extent, psychology, “originality” has been misleadingly tied to the notions of “creativity” and “genius,” thereby replicating a cultural bias that links an artist to particular mental processes that are unnecessarily exclusive; and (3) an experiential account of creativity like the one recently advanced by Bence Nanay not only disadvantages those artists whose lived experiences reflect fewer social opportunities than their counterparts, but also invokes a concept of luck that undermines the role of originality within an artwork's overall aesthetic value.5 Let us begin with some historical perspectives on the concept of originality from within the professional world of printmaking that do not always coincide with our intuitions. I. ORIGINALITY WITHIN THE WORLD OF PRINTMAKING In this section, I show that printmakers pursue the goal of aesthetic value, invoking the freedom to choose the appropriate medium for the expression of artistic intent and creativity, while print dealers choose to emphasize originality in order to enhance economic value. As philosophers or everyday appreciators of art, we may presume that originality is of primary importance to printmakers, but this may be due to the use of different meanings of the term, with printmakers invoking a more specialized, technical sense appropriate to their domain while philosophers (particularly these days) prefer a more general, psychological account. Many artists choose printmaking to experiment with techniques not afforded by other mediums; what seems paramount to them is artistic expression: both the freedom to choose the appropriate medium and the aesthetic value of the resulting product. This is particularly evidenced by painters who create prints that are based on their own previous paintings or who create a series of prints; in neither case is originality in the standard sense paramount. Moreover, originality is a concept that has often been invoked by print dealers with an aim of selling more artworks: the label is used in order to establish a legitimacy for the uniqueness of the product (versus painting, for example) and to market editions of prints which—by their very nature of being multiples of a “master” print—defy the notion of uniqueness inherent in (standard) originality.6 According to the website of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA), the definitive 2014 characterization of a print is as follows: A print is a work of graphic art which has been conceived by the artist to be realized as an original work of art, rather than a copy of a work in another medium. Prints are produced by drawing or carving an image onto a hard surface (known as the matrix) such as a wood block, metal plate, or stone. This surface is then inked and the image is transferred to paper by the application of pressure, thus creating an impression, or print. The printed image that results is the exact reverse of the image on the plate.7 This definition is a deliberate and thoughtful evolution of prior versions that sparked significant public debate within the world of printmaking and print collecting going back to the 1960s. How did this particular definition rise to prominence? Consider the case of the colorist painter and printmaker, Josef Albers, who by 1963 had created two suites of prints—the Day and Night and the Midnight and Noon portfolios—without either working on a matrix by his own hand or by pulling the resultant prints (Figure 1). After establishing a close working relationship with the “master” printer Kenneth Tyler at the newly founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop, he simply conveyed (not necessarily in person) his directions, allowing Tyler to carry them out. In one case, Tyler is said to have experimented with thirty‐five shades of blue ink in order to achieve the desired effect that was approved by Albers. In another, Tyler was “given a diagram showing the various possible configurations of Albers's Homage to the Square and was authorized to draw them whenever requested.”8 Albers's off‐site instructions to the on‐site master printer challenged previously established norms of both printmaking and originality dating back to the 1930s, resulting in such questions as: Is the resultant artwork a print? If so, whose print and on what grounds? Should it be considered an original Albers, that is, valuable for the purposes of attribution and sale, or rather simply an unoriginal collaboration? June Wayne, who was at the same time director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, described the relationship between artist and technician as a kind of ballet with the artist being like a composer and the printer, a performer.9 But traditionalists were neither pleased nor open‐minded to such free‐wheeling experimentation given the working definition that had been widely publicized in 1961 under the title, Prints? What is an Original Print, and revised in 1964 by the members of the Print Council of America (presumably after the intentional provocations by Albers): Open in new tabDownload slide Josef Albers (1888–1976). Day ± Night VIII from Day and Night: Homage to the Square (1963). One from a portfolio of ten lithographs, composition: 15 11/16 in. x 15 5/8 in. (39.9 × 39.7 cm); sheet: 18 3/4 in. x 20 3/8 in. (47.7 × 51.8 cm). Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © [1963] The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. An original print is a work of art, the general requirements of which are: 1. The artist alone has created the master image in or upon the plate, stone, wood block, or other material for the purpose of creating the print. 2. The print is made from the said material, by the artist or pursuant to his directions. 3. The finished print is approved by the artist. These requirements define the original print of today and do not in all cases apply to prints made before 1930.10 This definition required that the artist be physically responsible for the formation of the printing surface—such as the stone or plate—as well as pulling the impression that involved inking the matrix, applying the paper, running it through the press (if applicable); no apprentice or master printer collaborated. The master image was replicated in an edition that depended on the durability of the drawn image on the matrix, the pressure exerted by the press, and the number of prints that could be run from the matrix while maintaining consistently high quality. In 1972, Richard Field, then Assistant Curator of Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, complained that the 1964 definition reflected a “cult of individualism” that had held from 1850 through the 1950s peak of abstract expressionism, whereby a print was a visual image created solely by an individual artist, by his hand only.11 As he pointed out, the definition regrettably ruled out many prior collaborative works, “prints made before 1930,” considered by most art appreciators to be of exceptional quality and established aesthetic value, for example, “15th‐century woodcut through Dürer, Holbein, Bruegel, Titian, Raphael, Rubens, Van Dyke, the entire 18th century (especially Watteau), even Géricault, Toulouse‐Lautrec, and Cézanne, to Picasso, Rouault, Paolozzi, and Warhol.”12 Thus, in the early 1960s, an original print was narrowly and artificially conceived by the Print Council of America as an artifact made by a sole artist with direct and exclusive oversight and approval. The official definition stipulated the creation of a “master image” directly onto the matrix by the artist alone, plus his final approval. Some leeway was allowed in allowing the impression to be made “by the artist or pursuant to his directions” (my italics) but the rest of the definition clearly stipulated one artist, acting alone. Naturally, this added to the lingering stereotype of the creative Romantic artist of the eighteenth century or the individually heroic, defiant abstract expressionist of the twentieth: the lone (male) genius, solitary in his pursuit. By 1972, however, a seismic shift occurred in the thinking around prints, expressed in several ground‐breaking articles that appeared in The Print Collector's Newsletter that reversed this trend and re‐established a new, uniquely American paradigm of the artist‐as‐collaborator, often working in conjunct with a master printmaker.13 Richard Field cast this new role of the craftsman in relation to the artist as one that “varies from slavish imitation to collaboration and translation” while wholeheartedly approving of a master printer like Kenneth Tyler who was elevated to the status of “indispensable”: They assume a rank almost equal to that of the artist, a creative capacity never before experienced. … The contemporary artist and printer are not only collaborators justified by history, but in the case of photographic imagery, both artist and printer become processors—that is, they are both involved in transforming images from one medium to another. In this case, the distinction between artist and medium, the two terms whose relationship ‘originality’ seeks to specify, breaks down.14 On this account the technician (artist with a small a) is no longer subservient to the Artist but rather becomes a collaborator in the process of making original fine art prints: artist + Artist. This is especially true of photographic replication of an image that precludes drawing, etching, or otherwise altering a matrix directly by hand, where the Artist clearly fails to satisfy condition (1) of the 1964 Print Council of America: “The artist alone has created the master image in or upon the plate, stone, wood block, or other material for the purpose of creating the print.” Both creators become “processors” who simply transfer or “transform” the photographic image to a plate, stone, or screen: “from one medium to another.” Originality—meant to capture the distinction between Artist and artist—is eroded because the photographic image, which could clearly stand on its own as an artistic medium, has a previous existence that precedes its transfer to the matrix. It takes the place of a hand‐drawn, sketched, or incised image. The resulting impression (much like a photograph, also routinely printed on paper), replicates the image of the original photo—although it is not considered a copy. Both artist + Artist become “processors,” dissolving the hierarchy of status. Two points are worth making here that will resurface in my later discussion of luck. First, a technician/artist who aims to successfully collaborate is often willing to experiment in accord with an Artist's intentions to push the medium beyond its prior limits. As expressed by Robert Blackburn—founder of the Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan—“if an artist comes in and wants to step on the stone, then the printer's genius is to find out how to capture that”; thus the technician's creativity lies in being the artist who accommodates the Artist's intention.15 An interesting test case for this type of creativity took place in 1963 when Robert Rauschenberg actually broke in two the lithography stone on which he was working at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). The resultant work, entitled Accident, won first prize at the prestigious Ljubljana Graphic Biennial in 1963 and “established Rauschenberg, ULAE, and American printmaking in the forefront as never before” (Figure 2).16 We presume that the technician/artist who worked alongside the Artist to rescue and print—side by side—the two separate pieces of the litho stone would have normally discarded and tossed out the broken stone as useless. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Accident (1963). Lithograph on paper; sheet: 41 in. x 29 in. (105 × 75 cm). Publisher/Printer: Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and ULAE/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Second, this push to defy the limits of a medium can come from an Artist—such as a painter like Rauschenberg—who crosses over into another medium not yet knowing or having fully learned the skills, needing to work in close collaboration with a trained, professional technician/artist who knows and has worked within those limits. Consider the case of a screen print and litho that was considered a new type of “hybrid” created by Rauschenberg and Tyler entitled Booster which—at the unprecedented size of 72 by 35 inches—became the largest and most sophisticated hand‐pulled print to date in 1967. The work was executed at Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), and Tyler was the technician/artist who creatively implemented the Artist's intentions by working together with him to achieve the desired effect: Rauschenberg decided to use a life‐size X‐ray portrait of himself combined with an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the image of a chair and the images of two power drills. Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for Rauschenberg's ambitious project and the collaboration radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic printmaking.17 Five years later Chuck Close executed another landmark print entitled Keith/Mezzotint (1972), measuring 51 by 42 inches, which was based on—but did not exactly copy—a large acrylic painting of a friend's face that Close had created only two years earlier. Unfamiliar with the medium, Close repeatedly experimented on smaller plates before taking on the task of altering the large copper plate, pulling impressions on paper—sometimes in different colors—to assess the resulting product. Working proofs pulled from his test plates show the laborious process required to achieve a new and unique “velvety mezzotint black”: Chuck Close first visited Crown Point Press in 1972, when he began working with founder and director Kathan Brown to push the technical limits of the workshop, proposing to make the largest mezzotint ever printed (restricted only by the width then available of a sheet of copper—36 inches). In this massive scale, the mezzotint process—which involves scraping or burnishing a roughened plate of copper to produce a design—was highly experimental, and the arduous project took two months to complete, rather than the press's usual two weeks.18 These experimental cases are instrumental to understanding what happened between the 1950s and the early 1970s to establish the change in the definition of an “original” fine art print. In a concerted effort toward insuring artistic quality and creating an American market for its own printmakers, master printers like Tyler reinvigorated the enterprise of original printmaking. This change began with the founding in Los Angeles of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Inc. (TLW) in 1960 by Clinton Adams and founding director June Wayne as a way to “rescue” the dying art of lithography.19 As Wayne noted in 1972, TLW set new standards for American printmaking: Many years ago, when the European print‐publishers were cranking out fakes by the thousands, I instituted a policy of providing detailed documentation of lithographs created at Tamarind, a practice that has become a norm in the print market. I think the public has the right to know about edition size, collaborating craftspersons and much other technical data if they want it.20 Thus Tyler and Wayne initiated “the American Print Renaissance” which was considered a move by Americans to compete with European printmakers and to advance American art. But Wayne never offered a definition of “originality” in her short 1972 essay, “On Originality.” In fact, she denounced any attempt at a definition, seeing it as a proscription of artistic freedom and misdirection of attention away from the aesthetic object. Wayne strongly argued against the view that prints were cheap artworks for broad distribution and instead voiced what she called “the artist's point of view”: Hopefully, the public will come to know that the reason for making a print—from the artist's point of view—is that it is the medium of choice for certain kinds of images. I would make a lithograph even though only one impression could be pulled: the work of art is the raison d’être, and the edition is merely a secondary benefit.21 Gabriel Austin, also writing in the 1972 The Print Collector's Newsletter (and quoted at the beginning of this essay with his statement, “We have created a great ogre for ourselves—originality”), agreed with Wayne that “whether something is original or not is beside the point. The aesthetic quality of the final product is the most important element. The bugaboo ‘originality’ comes in chiefly as a selling point, seeming to give some kind of guarantee of quality.”22 What Austin is suggesting here is that the business of selling and collecting prints puts a premium on originality as if it were an aesthetic quality or as if it guarantees quality. But the cynical interpretation is that those who market and sell art—remember that the IFPDA is a print dealers’ association—want to enhance the monetary value of impressions by focusing on a print's claim to the status of originality. It is as if the print dealers want to put a premium on originality over aesthetic quality; or, if they conceive of originality as an aesthetic property, it ranks first and foremost in importance. Our lesson from history, then, is that Artists’ pushing against the constraints of print media by means of experimentation in collaboration with technicians/artists—seeking the best technique to express their goals—led to the more permissive definition that is currently promoted by the IFPDA, the 2014 definition which began our discussion: “A print is a work of graphic art which has been conceived by the artist to be realized as an original work of art, rather than a copy of a work in another medium.” That originality involves the antithesis of imitation and also involves the artist's intent to conceive and execute a print is confirmed and further elucidated by the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) in its stated separation of reproductive prints from fine art prints: Traditionally there are two categories of prints: reproductive prints and original, or fine, prints. Reproductive prints reproduce a work created in another medium, for example, painting. This kind of print was in high demand from about the sixteenth century forward, often used in artists’ studios as inspiration or to ensure consistency in representations of certain subject matter, such as religious or biblical scenes. The practice of copying a famous work of art using a printmaking process was not considered forgery and in fact was quite common. In the nineteenth century, with the advent of photography and photomechanical processes of reproduction, cheaper and more accurate reproductions of works of art could be made and so traditional printmaking as a form of reproducing a painting fell into disuse.23 Reproductions abound in the world of visual art. Consider that there have been many versions of Adam and Eve, the crucifixion of Christ, or images of the ancient goddess, Venus. Albers himself created hundreds of paintings and prints in his ongoing series, Homage to the Square. The distinction that the IFPDA is highlighting is that simply and accurately copying an image previously created in another medium precludes originality. In contrast to the reproductive print, the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) defines the original or fine art print as follows: The second category of print is the original or fine print. This type of print is created by an artist to be a work of art in its own right. That is to say, the artist creates original compositions and visual imagery, rather than copying another work of art. Artists are trained in any number of printmaking methods to yield distinctive appearances in their creations. The artist's choice of a technique or a combination of techniques depends on the specific effect the artist wishes to achieve.24 Clearly this definition is circular and far too vague to satisfy philosophers’ standards, but it provides a starting point, indeed one sanctioned by the mainstream world of printmaking. It is open to several criticisms, however. First, “originality” takes on a highly specialized twofold sense here, operating within the idiosyncratic domain of printmaking that can be cast in terms of (1) technique and (2) subject matter. Overall, “originality” means “not a copy,” so for a print to be considered original, an impression taken from a matrix must necessarily embody something new and unprecedented. More specifically, the Artist and artist(s) have utilized either (1) a new technique, for example, a larger than normal zinc plate, the inclusion of photographic x‐rays, a broken litho plate, a velvety mezzotint black; or (2) alternately or in addition, the Artist and artist(s) have introduced new content, for example, the resulting image of the life‐size x‐ray or the abstract image of the imprint of the broken litho stone on paper. Since prints typically appear in editions of multiples, it is only coincidentally true that we call each impression in an edition “original” since all impressions come from the same matrix and they all resemble the master print although they may differ in minute ways. They also resemble each other; in this respect, each cannot be truly said to be fully unique. Thus, “originality” does not consist in being entirely different from everything that came before—a conceptualization that may erroneously depend on the artists’ state of knowledge (see Section 3); rather, originality—specific to printmaking—depends on the absence of imitation of a previously created image, motif, technique, or representation. An artist's choice of technique certainly determines the composition and visual imagery that could count as original but there is no guarantee that the requisite type of distinctive appearances will result. Consider, for example, an artist who chooses to change one detail of a previously created crucifixion scene; has he satisfied the IFPDA requirement for a distinctive appearance or is the work still too derivative to be called original? Recall Mary Cassatt's numerous representations of mothers with children; does each print within her oeuvre need to embody distinctive appearances, however nuanced the changes? (An additional question might be, can an artist copy himself, thereby precluding originality?) A variety of techniques might help an artist attain such a goal, but techniques alone will not ensure requisite imagery. Stopping short of necessary and sufficient conditions, the printmaking world offers only a loose approximation of a definition, only a guideline, for what might constitute an original or fine art print. More importantly, we are at a loss to know what sorts of techniques or compositions would exhibit evidence of aesthetic quality, the most important element of the final product, according to Austin. When June Wayne minimized the importance of multiples, she emphasized the integrity of the individual art object and stressed that “the work of art is the raison d’être.” When Rauschenberg collaborated with Tyler on Booster, it “radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic printmaking.” For Artists, overall aesthetic quality trumps originality: experimentation—aided by the knowledge and experience provided by technicians/artists—naturally feeds the appropriate choice of expression that can result in aesthetic quality. Consider a second criticism of an aesthetic emphasis on originality. Most philosophers agree that originality is a valuable property of artworks insofar as they are new and unique physical objects created by artists for our aesthetic appreciation. (Conceptual art poses a problem, but let us avoid the pitfalls of an ontological analysis here.) But originality has played a more subordinate role in assessing the artistic value of artifacts considered to be craft (sometimes referred to as “low art”) and not fine (or high) art. Many examples come to mind, particularly when the objects in question are functional, for example, ceremonial, or practical everyday items such as quilts, pottery, textiles, tiles, jewelry, beadwork, or basketry. Only when the marketplace has inflated the price of a Navajo rug or an Early American quilt does the attribution of a particular artist's hand function to draw emphasis to the originality—and in fact, the cultural origin—of the piece. In most cases, early anonymous artists neither signed their work nor sought monetary compensation; they created functional objects for use within the home and family. In the process of elevating these works from low to high art, originality comes to matter in ways that artificially invoke an aesthetic standard that was previously irrelevant. Consider the recent rise of non‐Native patronage of Native‐made objects, whether crafts or fine art: Until the 1970s few art galleries—and virtually no large urban art museums—collected or displayed twentieth‐century Native art. For the most part, ethnographic museums, too, rejected works in Western media; they saw them as inauthentic and acculturated. Those that did buy prints, paintings or sculptures tended to value them as ethnographic documentation of traditional beliefs and lifestyles.25 The discernment of originality takes on additional layers of complexity involving authenticity when attributed to Native objects that have freely borrowed from other subcultures: sixteenth‐century Spanish conquistadors, seventeenth‐century Jesuit missionaries, the late nineteenth‐century Arts and Crafts Movement. Nonetheless, buyers of these works “sentimentalized and romanticized their acquisitions as precious traces of lost authenticity”—of “Indianness” itself—while creating a marketplace that elevated the work of certain individuals whose originality often, over time, turned into “repetitious and stereotypical images of the Indian as noble savage, tragic warrior, or new‐age mystic.”26 One case in point demonstrates this change in status and the controversies that result when graphic arts became an “introduced medium” brought in by outsiders (in this case a Canadian government representative by the name of James Houston) to help native populations of the Arctic and Subarctic regions of North America earn income and maintain independence during times of modernization and economic hardship: In contrast to most ethnic art traditions marketed to the Western world, Inuit art has, since the 1950s, been presented to outsiders as art made by particular individuals. Most sculpture has the artist's name incised on the stone; all prints are signed with the name of the artist upon whose drawing the print is based, and sometimes the printmaker is given credit as well.27 The artisan's hand becomes a criterion of merit, but as some critics complain, at the expense of aesthetic value, since contemporary Inuit prints and sculpture have been criticized as not being “real” indigenous art, but merely touristic productions introduced and sustained by outsiders. This is an unfair charge leveled at members of a Native culture for achieving success with printmaking, and one that highlights the arbitrariness of invoking a standard notion of originality. The irrelevance of the criticism is particularly evident concerning the work done in the Cape Dorset region of Canada, where a community of a few hundred people can produce over 100,000 drawings—although only a very small percentage of them are transformed into prints (the decision is often made by local community cooperatives through which the art is marketed). Invoking the now‐standard requirements for originality in printmaking, the first question that arises is whether Inuit prints fail to be original because they are based on drawings. Perhaps we would need to know more about how accurately each print copies a drawing to determine its originality, but recall that many artists like Albers or Close have based prints on their own previous works, so the Inuit works should surely pass this hurdle. More importantly, originality demands new technique or content. Cape Dorset artists use many techniques, including stencil, etching, engraving, and lithography, but have also initiated a stone‐cutting method that is unique to their own artisans—a process similar to Japanese woodcut where they cut directly into the stone; this sort of innovation should insure originality.28 Finally, consider content: The Enchanted Owl, a stonecut print (1960) by Kenojuak Ashevak, is, according to the Museum of Inuit Art, “arguably the most iconic Inuit print produced to date” (Figure 3).29 The artist split the run of fifty impressions into two colors: twenty‐five in green and twenty‐five in red. This meant that the stylized image of the owl, already unique and original, could provide viewers with two distinctive appearances, with color functioning to distinguish the different content. Why would anyone criticize such work on the grounds of originality? Open in new tabDownload slide Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013). The Enchanted Owl (1960). Stonecut on paper. 60.9 cm. x 66 cm. Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts or © Dorset Fine Arts. Turning away from printmakers’ specific guidelines for originality to the question of how originality can be used within the artworld to marginalize certain artists, feminist scholarship has explored the subtle ways and implicit impact of aesthetic judgments that disenfranchise female artists. Griselda Pollock uncovers gender differences operating below the surface of norms of evaluation and has suggested that the dominant voices in the artworld—those who hold the economic and social power—have deliberately established hierarchies that prioritize high art over low and fine art over craft in order to serve their interests.30 Even when certain artifacts that have traditionally been held to be of lower status come to command more respect and esteem, the overarching value system is basically left intact and unaltered. Offered as an example is the anonymity of European women who over hundreds of years were responsible for the embroidery of numerous ecclesiastical vestments and accessories, paramount to the ceremonial rituals of the Catholic Church.31 When revisionists extol the handiwork of previously unacknowledged individuals, along with the handicraft of other domestic arts, both political and aesthetic purposes are served. As Pollock argues, [their] feminist discourse on and from the position of marginalization, interrupting art history by a political voice challenging hierarchies of value, does have subversive force. … So the basis of the revaluation of patchwork quilts and weaving is the shifted appreciation of the work and creativity of the domestic sphere, or of traditions of working‐class female aesthetic choices and challenges.32 A revisionist aesthetic brings attention to the ingenuity and ultimately the originality of these works which were previously considered low art or craft; the hierarchy of value is overturned. Throughout the history of art there have been numerous instances of judgments that have disingenuously and conveniently devalued an artwork by criticizing the artist as imitative and unoriginal. One notorious and highly symbolic case is that of a 1799 painting first attributed to Jacques‐Louis David and valued very highly—in terms of both aesthetic merit and monetary value—by the staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art involved in its purchase. Upon discovering in it the creative hand of a woman that resulted in reattributing the painting to Constance‐Marie Blondelu Charpentier, who studied with and exhibited alongside David, the artwork precipitously fell in value. The scholar Charles Sterling concluded from presumably only visual evidence—undetected when he thought the work was painted by David—that the work was clearly deficient. “Its poetry, literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms, and its cleverly concealed weaknesses, its ensemble made up from a thousand subtle artifices, all seem to reveal the feminine spirit.”33 This type of devaluing of an art object by a supposedly objective, knowledgeable judge is not an isolated incident. In numerous cases where the aesthetic value is low, there is an implicit judgment about the maker—and his or her lack of artistic qualifications—lurking behind the aesthetic judgment. Originality is opportunistically used to cite Charpentier as a mere imitator, a student of David. Similar accusations have been made against seventeenth‐century painter Judith Leyster whose works lost value upon discovery of a brushstroke style which was criticized as imitative of Frans Hals. More recently, Lee Krasner's reputation suffered because of her being both the wife and imitator of her husband, Jackson Pollock; Elaine de Kooning also fared badly in comparison to Willem. Imagine the contrasting scenario: if originality were seriously and honestly invoked by art critics, historians, and aestheticians as an aesthetic property of the art object, then works by women artists, artists of color, or Native American artists would not have suffered the indignity of a systematic devaluing within the artworld over the past five centuries. Instead, they would have been recognized as being, in fact, highly original and unique: depicting both representational scenes and abstraction in ways previously unimaginable to more conventional (white, male, Caucasian) artists. Consider a more recent example: Judy Chicago's innovative body of work spanning over fifty years—including many types of prints and printmaking techniques—has defied the traditional, even clichéd, visual imagery created by her male predecessors and peers and challenged the many pronouncements of unoriginality made against her. In some cases, work such as her 1980s The Dinner Party was denounced by a prominent critic as failed art, that is, kitsch.34 Who but Chicago—at the start of the women's movement—would have dared create a photolithograph which pictured a woman's hand extracting a bloody tampon, as she did in her 1971 work, Red Flag? Men have dominated the acceptable iconography of pornography for millennia, but Chicago could envision a challenge to their authority in the lithographs of her 1975 Butterfly Vagina Erotica series. From her celebratory 1999 Voices from the Song of Songs (heliorelief, lithography, and hand coloring) to her 2004 intaglio prints based on the watercolor versions of Anaïs Nin's Fragments from the Delta of Venus, Chicago has been incredibly original in her depictions of sexuality and female sexual desire, presented from a woman's point of view (Figure 4).35 Her 1989 works entitled Holocaust Project, completed with her husband Donald Woodman, depicted the indifference to the Jews’ plight at the hands of the Nazis with a mix of techniques, including photography on photolinen. Again, if critics and aestheticians truly valued originality, Chicago would not have struggled within the artworld for five decades, attempting to establish a wider, professional audience beyond that of the many women and feminists who already admired and tracked her work.36 She would not have been denounced for daring to visually depict the Holocaust.37 Open in new tabDownload slide Judy Chicago (b. 1939). The Return of the Butterfly from Retrospective in a Box (2012). Lithograph. 24 in. x 24 in. Photo: © Donald Woodman. Photo courtesy of Judy Chicago / Art Resource, NY. © [2012] Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Consider another body of work that is not as well known. There is a “Fine Art Prints Collection” by American women printmakers within The Library of Congress that comprises over 100,000 pieces, ranging from circa 1480s to the present, and includes such names as Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Isabel Bishop (1902–1988), Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), Jaune Quick‐to‐See Smith (b. 1940), Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941), and Alison Saar (b. 1956).38 The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division offers a similar explanation to that given by Parker and Pollock for the prior exclusion of women from the mainstream world of art: The study and practice of art in traditional public arenas such as guilds, academies, and studios remained off‐limits to most women until the mid‐nineteenth century. Around that time, art schools began extending admission to female students, bringing increasing numbers of women creators into the mainstream of the art world. The division's holdings reflect this history.39 The collection also demonstrates a number of women since the late nineteenth century who created prints but whose names are mostly unrecognizable—in spite of the graphic arts being misleadingly touted by the Library of Congress as an equal opportunity medium of choice: Prints have been referred to as the “democratic art” because they provide a means of making works of art widely available. As with some of the other popular art media, such as posters and book and magazine illustrations, prints have historically been a democratic medium in the sense that they early offered a field in which woman artists could flourish.40 The operative word here is “could,” which invites closer examination of opportunities that are offered to artists versus the capabilities those artists might actually have based on factors like social status and access. In examining the social experiences of women, history is both informative and revealing. Women may have had more access to the printmaking studio in the last one hundred and fifty years, but this did not necessarily result in a democratic medium open to all. For example, women benefited greatly (for the first time in the twentieth century) from the first formal printmaking program at the Art Students League of New York in 1922 and the creation of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project printmaking unit, but they only comprised one fourth of the number of artists and suffered further cutbacks when graphic arts workshops closed in the early 1940s.41 It was not easy for women to break into printmaking studios to gain access to expensive equipment which was often collectively or commercially owned. Eventually, however, their numbers increased—particularly in teaching positions at colleges and universities—after they acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to operate presses and compete professionally. But women artists in general, and printmakers in particular, still receive much less attention than their male counterparts in terms of exposure, sales, gallery representation, museum shows, permanent collections, and visibility in art history texts and art publications, in both books and journals.42 Printmaking may be a more democratic art because impressions occur in multiples and can be sold or distributed more widely, but it does not follow that women are more democratically represented or are invited to participate along with men, who continue to dominate the profession when measured in terms of commercial success and recognition. In this section, I have argued that within the world of art, particularly printmaking, originality is valued as a property by artists and printmakers, but less so than their overall goal of achieving aesthetic value and the expression of artistic intention in a particular medium. The concept of originality is particularly complex when applied to the domain of the graphic arts, yielding an emphasis on both technique and content that is nonimitative. A standard of originality has historically been invoked, however, by print dealers to establish an economic basis for selling editions of prints which, by their very nature of being multiples of the “master” print, defy the notion of uniqueness inherent in originality. I have criticized this overemphasis on the concept of originality as leading to the term's abuse as a norm for aesthetic value. Moreover, the overemphasis has proven to be a strategy by the more privileged members of the artworld system to devalue artworks by artists who fail to fit the paradigm of creative art maker, reserved primarily for the white male artists who continue to dominate the world of art. A proper evaluation of printmaking, together with a revised appreciation of undervalued artists in traditions outside the mainstream artworld, requires a clearer and improved definition of originality. In search of this I now turn to recent discussions about the mind, intentionality, and creativity, which have all been linked to originality in views recently promoted by both philosophers and psychologists. II. ORIGINALITY WITHIN THE WORLD OF PHILOSOPHY What is originality? Often confused with the concept of creativity, originality has also been inseparably linked by philosophers to the concept of genius—embodied within the lone, individual creator who creates art with universal appeal—beginning with the precedent set by Kant.43 The idealized notion of a true genius holds that he does not rely upon divine inspiration but rather, as Carolyn Korsmeyer notes, “creates from the reserves of his own imagination. Genius signals a powerfully original mind that vaults over tradition and rules of art to discover entirely new ways of conceiving and enacting creativity.”44 Paradigms often cited are Homer, Horace, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, van Gogh, and Duchamp; a more inclusive list offered by Philip Alperson includes Georgia O'Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, with the acknowledgment that Kant's characterization of genius has come under intense criticism, “especially by feminists and Marxists, who object to the model of subjectivity inherent in such a view and the related eclipse of the role of economic and social conditions and institutional structures that serve as preconditions for creative achievement in the arts.”45 Generally, philosophers do not delve below the surface of their models of human creativity to notice the relevant underlying economic or social conditions, or to analyze the institutional structures that serve as preconditions for it. In other words, they do not recognize any role for factors such as gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, or global location (a social category investigated by social epistemologists).46 In this section, I give creativity an admittedly inconclusive look in order to better understand the philosophical criteria that have standardly been used to account for the type of mental processes that link originality to genius through human creativity.47 I focus in particular on a recent proposal by Bence Nanay, who explains the requisite mental activity by means of an experiential account of creativity. It emerges that his account unavoidably depends on reference to a certain type of idealized person, and thus turns out to be similar to previous accounts in the tradition by authors like Hume and Kant. This is irrespective of whether the objects created are actually original or not. Careful observers like Nanay are quick to distinguish originality as a publicly observable property of entities such as physical objects and art‐objects (as well as of styles, utterances, and behaviors) from creativity as a property of mental processes which is not normally publicly observable.48 This observation dates back to the twentieth‐century expression theories of art promoted by R.G. Collingwood and highlighted by the anti‐intentionalist Monroe Beardsley, who sought to emphasize the audience's response to the formal properties of the art object—to the exclusion of artist's intentions and the object's contextually relevant properties.49 This debate influenced Richard Wollheim's emphasis on the spectator's role as observer of the properties of an art object, as well as Arthur Danto's and George Dickie's enhanced reconceptualization of the role of the artist who, given the proper conditions within the institutions of art, could be empowered to confer a special status of art upon any object.50 Despite the interest in recent analytic aesthetics in aspects of observers’ or interpreters’ mental states and their roles in recognizing art, the creative mental states of artists themselves have not received so much attention, according to Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, editors of a 2014 collection entitled, The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays.51 They lament an insufficient interest in the topic among contemporary philosophers after citing the standard canonical lineup of writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and they chide philosophers for ignoring recent scientific research.52 They find support for this complaint from aestheticians Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, who went so far as to complain in 2003 that “[a]lthough the creation of art is a topic that should be a central one for aesthetics, it has been comparatively neglected in recent philosophical writing about art.”53 After citing the failure of philosophical aesthetics to study creativity, Paul and Kaufman highlight a bonanza of new thought from psychology, stemming from the presidential address of J.P. Guilford who, at the American Psychological Association in 1950, called for research on the topic. This new thought is evidenced in an array of sources, from academic conferences, to multiple peer‐reviewed journals, textbooks, undergraduate and graduate courses in the psychology of creativity, the psychology section of The Creativity Post, and an official division of the American Psychological Association on the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts.54 According to two authors who studied the history of research on creativity, nearly all eminent psychologists of the twentieth century have studied creativity and “the field can only be described as explosive.”55 It appears, then, that perhaps our hope for a twenty‐first‐century guide for answering questions about creativity, and hopefully also originality, rests on experts in the field of psychology—or more appropriately, as suggested by Paul and Kaufman, a “new school of creativity researchers” who utilize an interdisciplinary approach that involves both philosophy and psychology.56 I next look at several possible avenues from this new school of thought; but first, it behooves us to pause and assess the purported neglect of “creativity” within recent philosophical writing about art. It is puzzling to any contemporary feminist philosopher, particularly an aesthetician, to read a “definitive” report by experts in the field alleging that recent philosophical writing has sorely neglected to explore the topics of originality, creativity, and the concomitant notion of genius. These individual concepts are so intertwined that every canonical artist or writer routinely cited by several authors in the Paul and Kaufman volume, for example, is conceived to be a combined paradigm of all three: Nanay cites Mozart and Marcel Duchamp; Simon Blackburn cites Bernini, Titian, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Henry James, Charles Darwin, and Einstein;57 Matthew Kieran cites Picasso, Einstein, Mozart, Caravaggio, and van Gogh.58 The problem with such lists from a feminist perspective is obvious (and perhaps only exacerbated by the rare mention of a woman, as in Alperson). In the past forty years, feminist art theory, criticism and aesthetics—in literature, art history, women's studies, gender studies, philosophy, and cultural studies—have focused on creativity with intense and detailed discussions.59 For example, scholars have examined noteworthy differences between male and female creativity, particularly the depiction of the female body, and explored the gender dynamics in the psychology, intentionality, and originality of fine art originating from female lives.60 Often this art is feminist in nature—promoting equal opportunity for women—though it need not be.61 Feminists have challenged the exclusivity of the notion of “genius” and demanded the restructuring of museums that lionize the male creative genius to the exclusion of others.62 In other words, since the 1970s, there has been a veritable revolution in the way originality and creativity have been conceived by the mainstream artworld: a radical change in the way critics, theorists, and historians talk about the ways artists create and subsequently, how viewers experience and judge art. Strangely, this widespread and sustained acknowledgment of a feminist revolution has failed to inform mainstream philosophical writing. Given the prodigious output of scholarly writing which both re‐examines the ideas of genius and reassesses the creativity of women and other marginalized groups, mainstream philosophical aesthetics seems either negligent (upon a sympathetic reading of the situation) or intentionally dismissive (enacting a disenfranchisement of its own). Korsmeyer offers an explanation for this inattention, namely, the phenomenon of feminism's “hidden impact,” whereby the influence of feminist thinking on mainstream philosophy has been significant but unacknowledged because of the indirect absorption of feminist terminology and thinking into the discourse.63 One example she cites is the rise of interest in everyday aesthetics. Another is the recent popularity of the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation and the psychology of art after feminist theorists had written about the emotions as a topic for decades—challenging the dominant thinking in a variety of ways: the hegemony of reason over emotions, the misogynist bias against women as emotional beings, and the (self‐) expression of emotions in women's art.64 Most current aestheticians, however—even those of the new school of creativity researchers—consistently fail to acknowledge the contributions of women, and of feminist writers and artists. How can one study the requisite mental states of creativity without studying women's art, or without recognizing important points made repeatedly—since at least the time of Virginia Woolf—about the role of social and economic factors in fostering it?65 The analogy to physicians and researchers studying the effects of medicine primarily on male bodies comes to mind, reminding us of the advances made by feminist bioethics to correct the disproportionate emphasis on men's health.66 The feminist critique in that field started with a challenge to the common presumption that the human norm for bodily health was exclusively male. It is reasonable to expect something similar to be true about the role of gender differences in mental states and lived experiences: the stuff of which creativity is made. Given this reminder about the insights from feminist art theory on the gendered basis of concepts like originality and genius, I now can consider in more detail recent thoughts on what turns out to be an equally genderized vision in recent studies of creativity. Nanay offers an experiential account of creativity whereby creativity is a mental process not primarily or exclusively reliant upon functional or computational mechanisms: Being original is usually contrasted with being derivative: An idea, for example, is original if it is not derived from someone else's idea. A scientific discovery or artwork is original if it is not derivative. … Originality is a property of normally publically observable entities (not just of physical objects, but also of styles, utterances, and behaviors). Creativity, in contrast, is not normally publicly observable. It is a feature of our mental processes. Being creative is not contrasted with being derivative, but rather with being mechanical. Whether a mental process is creative tells us nothing about what kind of entities (if any) it produces.67 On its own, this last statement is misleading since Nanay does seek to connect the two—creativity and originality—but his account ultimately falls short, and for reasons that my summary of feminist critiques of originality would make us anticipate. Nanay argues that his account has greater explanatory power than its rivals, particularly with regard to three crucial features: (1) explaining why it is tempting to intuitively think that creativity is something that happens to us, rather than something we do; (2) explaining why the experience of appreciating other people's creativity can seem similar to the experience of one's own; and (3) explaining why we take creative actions to be genuine actions.68 But ultimately he concludes, “There is no simple connection between these two notions” and creativity does not insure artistic or scientific originality; one can creatively solve a math problem or a crossword puzzle and originality can spring from a purely mechanical mental process that is not creative.69 Nanay explicitly states that creativity is neither necessary nor sufficient for originality, although novelty is necessary for originality. Novelty, it turns out, is loosely based on the mechanical and computational model of creativity offered by Margaret Boden: “An idea is creative only if the person in whose mind it arises experiences it as something she has not taken to be possible before.”70 This, in effect, means for Nanay that, “At time t, the agent considered a number of possibilities. Later, at time t*, she comes up with a possibility that she experiences as something that is different from all the possibilities she considered at time t.”71 It bears mentioning that for Nanay, it does not matter if another agent comes up with the same possibility earlier than his agent; his agent is still creative, albeit anachronistically given that in her mind—not, perhaps, in the more public marketplace of ideas—her experience insistently yields an idea that counts as creative, even if the resulting physical artwork, let's say, looks like a copy or appears to be derivative of someone else's earlier work (or idea). Imagine an agent who is bereft of past experiences of seeing prints created in a professional workshop like Tamarind. In fact, during its first ten years (1960–1970) and in spite of the fact that the director was June Wayne, TWL did not hire any women as printer fellows and only 11% of the artists were women.72 It took the feminist movement of the 1970s to allow for Judith Solodkin—the first “mistress printress”—to be hired in 1974. For our imagined agent—or perhaps for Solodkin herself—every idea that she experienced could be something that was different from all the possibilities she had considered before and thus each could have counted as creative. However, this insures an impoverished notion of creativity—albeit one that would surely feed the ego of any artist who sees herself as innovative, at least in her own mind!73 (Nanay indirectly deals with this problem of lack of sufficient knowledge, which I discuss shortly.) This approach to creativity, as well as Boden's on which it is based, perhaps demonstrates most aptly the limitations that an experiential analysis of creativity confronts in comparison to accounts of originality, at least in terms of providing helpful guidelines for assessing works of art. If the accolade of “creative” can be applied equally to the mental processes of the truly creative thinker who thinks of an idea first as well as to the not‐truly creative thinker who merely “experiences” the thought as “something that is different from all the [previous] possibilities considered,” then, in effect, the concept of creativity neither captures what we normally consider praiseworthy about new, breakthrough, and valuable ideas nor provides us much insight as to how creativity is linked to originality, unless we can accurately track creators’ thoughts—t, t*, t**, and so on—as to when they occurred and who had them first: a daunting task! One is reminded of Arthur Danto's insightful analysis of what counted as new and noteworthy in the evolution of what he calls “art‐relevant predicates” (he offered such examples as “is representational” and “is expressionist”) based on when, in the history of art‐making, artists imbued artworks with those new and unprecedented properties. His account captured the richness of creative thought, its unpredictability, and why it is so highly valued within aesthetics: It is, of course, not easy to see in advance which predicates are going to be added or replaced by their opposites, but suppose an artist determines that H shall henceforth be artistically relevant for his paintings. Then, in fact, both H and non‐H become artistically relevant for all painting, and if his is the first and only painting that is H, every other painting in existence becomes non‐H, and the entire community of paintings is enriched, together with a doubling of the available style opportunities.74 For Danto, creativity brings novelty and novelty sets important precedents and milestones, often leading to entirely new art movements. A work's overall value is enhanced by novelty. Contrast his laudatory view with Nanay's unenthusiastic focus on the ordinariness of creativity as he conceptualizes it: “Creativity, as I understand it, is quite a banal phenomenon. It is not to be restricted to the mental processes of a select few: Beethoven, Einstein, and the like. It is something much more common and much less mysterious. Originality, in contrast, is much rarer.”75 I believe artists seek something more akin to Danto's passion for the creative impulse, artistic expression, and aesthetic value (as I argued in Section 2); they do not generally aspire to engage in mental processes that are banal. In spite of his hesitancy to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity, Nanay comes very close. Recall his earlier proposal of a necessary condition: “An idea is creative only if the person in whose mind it arises experiences it as something she has not taken to be possible before.” Thus, if we want to give a (close to) sufficient condition for creativity, we need to add that the experience that defines creative mental processes needs to be veridical: the idea in question really needs to be something I have not taken to be possible before—it is not enough if I experience it as such.76 In effect, Nanay strengthens his account by arguing that an idea is creative if and only if the person in whose mind it arises not only experiences it as something she has not taken to be possible before but in fact, has not taken it to be possible before. In other words, “If we add the veridicality condition, what we get is that this idea is something I have not taken to be possible before.”77 Basically, the thinker has been unable to, or blocked from, imagining such an idea before; she could have but did not. This additional condition confirms that novelty plays a crucial necessary role for originality but also veers close to claiming that novelty is sufficient. Nanay's prime example (as with previous authors on creativity such as David Novitz) is Charles Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization of rubber, which occurred after a process of apparently dropping random substances, including cream cheese, into liquid rubber until he “stumbled upon” sulfur.78 Nanay argues that this could be a creative mental process, or it could be a mechanical process of trial‐by‐error, but, he asks, how is one to know? Readers may find this interrogative conclusion less than satisfying after his suggestion of something like a workable set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Nanay would say that we do not—indeed, cannot?—have adequate access to Goodyear's mental processes in order for us to judge him creative. To Nanay, however, he may still have been creative. Does Nanay's conclusion offer us any help in determining whether, by analogy, an artist and/or his collaborator master printer/technician are creative? And how does this help us decide on the originality of their resultant artworks? For the sake of argument, let us assume that we can know something about the mental processes of an artist. For an artist who deliberately sifts through possibilities in her head in a mechanical way, simply eliminating some, we might conclude on Nanay's view that she is not creative. But suppose that her resulting fine art print is a result of mental processes in which she had not previously thought of a particular “distinctive appearance” in composition or visual imagery but now, lo and behold, here it is before her. Then we could deem her mental processes creative. But if this is the account, then what do we make of the collaboration between artist and technician? Recall Field's description of the artist and printer who are “not only collaborators” but in the case of photographic imagery, both “processors” that break down the distinction between artist and medium, “the two terms whose relationship ‘originality’ seeks to specify.”79 If both are processors of nearly equal creative input, whose mental processes do we assess? How do we separate the two, and then separate both the creators from the medium itself? It seems as if Nanay's account of creativity leads us to a successive string of questions that yields only insufficient information; on the experiential theory, we are unable to commend Albers over Tyler, yet only the former gets to sign the finished print and sell it as his original creation. Not until the last few paragraphs of the essay does Nanay attempt to connect creativity directly to originality by posing an additional requirement upon the agent/thinker/artist, namely, deep and extensive knowledge of his field of thought when assessing possibilities: “if I am really fully informed about my field, then it follows that this idea is not only creative; it is also original [my italics]”.80 I am led to ask, what counts as being “really fully informed”? One way to understand the really fully informed agent is to appeal to David Hume's eighteenth‐century Man of Taste who upholds the highest standards for aesthetic judgments by possessing the qualities of refined sentiments, capacities, and a broad range of comparative experiences and resulting knowledge. But we should remember that Hume's Man of Taste enjoys the privileges of educational and career opportunities, repeated exposure to great works of art, and multiple experiences of learning about art objects. No sensible feminist would deny the valuable role an informed judge or knowledgeable creative agent plays in assessing aesthetic merit. But when that judge is more subjective than objective, more biased than open‐minded, it has often been the work of underrepresented artists that is disadvantaged and their artistic skills and intelligence that are devalued. The feminist critique in aesthetics of the well‐trained Man of Taste is already well rehearsed, as is feminist epistemology's extensive challenge to the standard of the neutral and objective knower.81 For Nanay to default to a notion of the “really fully informed knower” is surprising since surely doubts arise here, even with the case of Goodyear. How would we ever know if Goodyear was really fully informed about his field? How can Goodyear know if he is really fully informed about his field? Similarly, shall we simply assume this is true of Albers and that he was really fully informed, and thus creative, but that Tyler, his technician, was not? To cite another case mentioned earlier, we could ask about who is fully informed about the relevant matters concerning Chicago's Red Flag, Butterfly Vagina Erotica, Voices from the Song of Songs, and Fragments from the Delta of Venus, assuming these matters include female sexuality and female sexual desire. Surely if the relevant ways of being informed involve lived experiences that are firsthand and authentic, it is Chicago or a female viewer. But if we are adopting the perspective of the male observer (as described, for example, by Laura Mulvey's influential notion of the male gaze), or perhaps the voyeur of pornography that seeks to satisfy male desire, then a more viable standard would be the male viewer.82 Surely an experiential account of creativity that relies upon being really fully informed would recognize the creativity of Chicago's mental prowess and her resulting original prints in comparison to the passive (and headless) female depicted in Courbet's famous 1866 painting L'Origine du monde or André Masson's 1955 derivative version pictured on the cover of Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays.83 I raise these questions to spur more debate between philosophers and their feminist colleagues. Questions about creativity and originality can raise substantive issues of deep gender that seriously challenge assumptions, including our commonly accepted modes of interpretation and evaluation of the iconography of female nudity. And along with these questions there also arise hard ones about more abstract notions of originality and creativity. Fair and full interpretation of the imagery I have mentioned depends on knowledge informed by feminist art epistemologies that link lived experiences—of art, of being a woman or of being a man—to a proper understanding of intentionality.84 This is equally true of answers to questions about originality. To see this, and in conclusion, I propose an alternate approach to the pivotal role of experience in an account of creativity like Nanay's. As Simone de Beauvoir so aptly argued, experiences do not take place in the absence of a person's thoughts and actions.85 Experiences are more properly called “lived experiences,” and a woman's lived experiences can differ significantly from those of a man, particularly given differences in body composition, strength, and mental and emotional capacities. If Nanay is willing to allow a computer to be creative based on experiences, what meaning does the term ‘experience’ retain? Broadening the scope of the term to include a computer that can mentally process possibilities—in more than a computational way, whether we call it “thinking” or not—stretches the concept to a breaking point: certainly beyond the point of what we would normally regard as lived. Consider a recent example that demonstrates the role of lived experiences within a noteworthy lifelong career of printmaking, a specialized domain within the artworld. Self‐Portrait Screenprint 2012 (2012) is a silkscreen by Chuck Close that is printed in a remarkable two hundred and forty‐six colors. When the artist was feted with his first‐ever survey of groundbreaking work in the field of printmaking—at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2010—his techniques were laid bare; numerous grids, matrices, proofs, and other techniques demonstrating his experimentation and collaboration over the years resulting in over one hundred finished works on display. The text for the exhibit elaborated upon his skills (without including any information in the original press release of who assisted him as collaborators/technicians): When making a print, Close and his collaborators complete every stage of their process—from translating an image onto a matrix, to carving wood blocks, etching plates, and applying multiple layers of color—by hand. The mammoth scale and technical complexity of many of his portraits, combined with his time‐consuming process, often means that a single print may take years to complete. Close welcomes this challenge, stating that “when you have very strict limitations, you have to be … very creative to figure out a way of getting them to work for you.”86 One way to conceptualize the creative process is to see Close as the Artist who has enough knowledge of the craft to think beyond the given limitations of the medium at the time of production—what might be called imaginative creativity—while the artist(s) who assist him devise the technical means to execute those Artistic intentions—what might be called procedural creativity. Close's access to complex printmaking processes over the span of forty years enabled him to be in the position to exercise his imagination freely, in unprecedented ways, and to utilize the specialized resources provided by a professional studio with skilled technicians. But not all artists are so fortunate. If creativity within the specific domain of printmaking is dependent on such specialized lived experiences that may not be open to all artists, then it might be appropriate to say that the disenfranchisement of certain artists—like women and other marginalized groups—is actually the marginalization of certain kinds of domains in which creativity may flourish but not necessarily for all artists.87 In contrast, for instance, one might say that painting is actually a much more democratic art: an art domain that is easier to pursue and requires no specialized equipment or knowledge. All one needs is paper or canvas, brushes, and paint. Recall that at the beginning of this section, I described Alperson as bringing attention to the economic and social conditions and institutional structures that serve as preconditions for creative achievement in the arts: opportunities denied to women that curtailed their lived experiences. In effect, Nanay's experiential theory of creativity presupposes an artist who—much like Kant's genius or Hume's Man of Taste—has lived through experiences that have allowed him to enjoy the opportunities of male privilege. Like women in science and engineering, the woman who attempted to break through the gender barrier at the highest level of creativity was rare and indeed, considered abnormal. No woman was eligible for the accolade of “genius” no matter her artistic output. Given the number of women we surely hold to be creative, perhaps even geniuses, a serious reevaluation of the role of their gendered lived experiences is long overdue. III. ORIGINALITY, CREATIVITY, AND THE ROLE OF LUCK At the point at which we hope that Nanay's experiential account of creativity will yield a plausible framework to better understand creativity and originality, a surprising turn of events takes us down an unexpected path; we are introduced to the mysterious role of luck: “My conclusion is that we don't have enough information to judge whether Goodyear was creative. It is also important to note that what is interesting about Goodyear's example has little to do with creativity. What is striking about it is that he was incredibly lucky.”88 This sudden emphasis on luck is baffling for anyone who thought that what is precisely interesting about Goodyear as an example—and Nanay's theory to explain his discovery—is Goodyear's creative thought processes. These are presumably autonomous and under his control, but if what is central is actually the role of luck, our worries grow exponentially, since there seems to be so little about luck that one can anticipate or control. Interestingly, there is a similar reference to not‐so‐dumb luck in Simon Blackburn's analysis of creativity. He rejects the role of divine inspiration and subconscious illumination when he explains the aha moment of a long‐sought solution to a problem, or the choice of the right words for a poem or, presumably, an artist's decision on the right shade of blue: We meet an impasse, and then suddenly, as if from nowhere, the problem is seen differently and the solution comes. The question is only whether the “as if from nowhere” can be seen as the result of psychological processes continuous with those involved in more mundane cogitation. For after all, during cognitive “business as usual,” things occur to us as if from nowhere. … We should remember as well that “business as usual” is by no means the controlled, rational, linear process that we sometimes take it to be. … It is, as it were, business as usual, plus being in the right place at the right time. This much is luck, not character.89 What a surprising turn of events, invoking luck as deus ex machina! For Nanay, Goodyear is a Man of Luck; he was in the right place at the right time. He possessed intelligence enhanced by education, a laboratory for experimentation, and a mind whose mental processes functioned mechanically but also nonmechanically, that is, experientially, thinking of new possibilities that might count, for Nanay, as genuine instances of creativity. For Blackburn, not‐so‐dumb luck positioned Bernini, Shakespeare, and Einstein to be in the right place at the right time, even in terms of business as usual, that is, normal cognitive and psychological processes. Blackburn is right about one thing: luck is not so dumb after all, because it is not just luck; the examples both authors cite are in fact models of achievement. They are men whose level of education, access to opportunity, and resulting accomplishments—scientific or artistic success—resulted from the position each was able to hold within a society that systematically excluded women from equal or even minimal participation. One might say that under these social conditions women, indeed, were unlucky; in fact, they were unlucky to be born female at all! A more nuanced reading of the concept of luck exposes assumptions Nanay and Blackburn make about the rules and underlying social conventions that barred women from achieving creativity by being positioned to exploit opportunities open primarily to men. Luck itself fixes an artist's possibilities; surely one of the reasons women turned to printmaking was because the official avenues of professional painting and sculpting were barred from them, that is, unless they wanted either to serve primarily as models for male painting students and instructors or to attend classes in which the nude model was banned because female students were present. Consider how to characterize these women printmakers’ lack of luck. Were they simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Nanay's experiential theory, whereby originality depends on not being derivative, tells us too little about the creator's mental processes, in particular about what makes them possible. We now know that women aspiring to be artists were systematically denied the experiences of education, training, opportunity, guilds, academies, and the art market—which clearly proscribed their creativity and artistic output. The Library of Congress collection of 100,000 prints by women may sound like a large number but it dwindles in significance if we consider the lack of women artists who have been exhibited, collected, feted, and considered essential to the history and current culture of art. Printmaking has not equalized the playing field for women artists. Many women artists have lacked the money, patronage, and external funding to purchase expensive equipment, establish a studio space, and sustain a printmaking facility and/or they have not successfully transitioned from protective art educational contexts such as university art departments to the professional and often solitary life of printmaker.90 More to the point, social factors that masquerade as “Luck” for Nanay and Blackburn, along with the male paradigms they hold up as models, are ignored in favor of an analysis of the intricacies of mental processes which, we are reminded, we can never really know. Philosophers once criticized feminist theory as lacking philosophical substance, claiming that the exploration of gender issues involves mere sociology, not deep philosophical analysis. But to dissect the mind at work as it pushes an experimental printing technique or sketches a reclining female nude relies upon experiences that are undeniably lived by individual persons—these in addition to a playful role of imagination (to recall Kantian thinking). Since they are circumscribed by social and cultural conditions, lived experiences should matter, especially in an experiential theory like Nanay's. They are instances of “deep gender” in Korsmeyer's sense: factors that lie below the surface of artistic making and aesthetic judgments, “conceptual frameworks that guide philosophy.”91 Yet a third author, Matthew Kieran, also invokes the concept of luck in explaining creativity. Kieran provides a much fuller picture of what I will call the Man of Luck, based on Aristotle's classical concept of the Man of Virtue. In contrast to Blackburn, who distinguishes luck from character, Kieran argues that creativity is a virtue of character, strongly tied to intrinsic (versus extrinsic) motivation: Indeed being able to recognize the good in a “lucky accident” and going on to use it to advantage depends upon the kind of insight and mastery tied up with being a creative individual. The creative person is sensitive to and acts in the light of reasons. It is her responsiveness to reasons that grounds her judgments and actions in recognizing what is new and valuable [that is, creative] in the relevant domain.92 Use of the female pronoun notwithstanding, Kieran's creative genius is in fact a type of Aristotelian Man of Virtue. When the term ‘man’ is read generically, anyone—male or female—can exercise reason and virtue. On a feminist reading, however, Aristotle bluntly expresses the consensus of his time and place: “For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male. …”93 Women lack what men naturally have, outlined in a series of dichotomies whereby the male is the “measure against which the female is judged lacking”: capacity/incapacity, active/passive, form/matter, superior/inferior.94 More relevant to the point of contemporary experiential and virtue‐based theories of creativity, women's full participation as rational paragons of virtue is tenuous because their bodies—which are more closely tied to nature due to their reproductive physiology (smaller, weaker, less upright)—determine their psychology. According to Aristotle, woman is: more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. … more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action.95 As a result, woman lacks intellect and reason and whether free or slave, she must be ruled by a man; “she is excluded from the realm of practical wisdom—reasoned arguments designed to identify right from wrong” and thus incapable of moral reasoning.96 Her virtue lies in her obedience to a virtuous man. Based on a strict reading of Aristotle's conception of moral virtue, it is doubtful that a woman could ever possess creativity as a virtue of character as Kieran's model suggests, particularly since Kieran lists more than a dozen relevant qualities: … mastery, control, and sensitivity to reasons in guiding how agents bring about what they aim to do … strength and depth of his intrinsic motivation over time … perseverance, courage, and honest self‐criticism … humility and open‐mindedness to recognize when one has gone wrong; and it takes perseverance and fortitude to continue to work at something for its own sake … 97 Kieran adds that a creative person is also patient, a perfectionist, a hard worker, and one who displays fortitude in the face of public disdain.98 This list of characteristics seems well grounded and insightful. However, the fact that Kieran relies upon a misogynist classical writer as the primary foundation for his contemporary analysis, coupled with his lack of any female exemplars, might make even a casual reader suspicious of such a characterization of creativity—specifically about whether this virtue of character is actually achievable by everyone. Ironically, women—often unlucky and disenfranchised—have been immortalized in painting and literature as Fortuna, and more recently in song as Lady Luck.99 Frank Sinatra once sang, “Luck be a lady tonight.”100 In the language of speech acts, the singer and the composer—who initially wrote the lyrics in 1950 for the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls—issue a direct command. A gambler, as Sinatra sings, insists that Luck, cast as a lady who can bestow a winning hand or turn of the dice, be nice—“Luck let a gentleman see just how nice a dame you can be,” loyal—“A lady never flirts with strangers. … A lady doesn't wander all over the room and then blow on some other guy's dice,” constant—“A lady doesn't leave her escort,” and always present—“Never get out of my sight.” The lyrics demand that Luck produce rewards for the gambler while he attempts to control her. But what about the agency or autonomy of Lady Luck herself? Luck in Sinatra's famous song provides an apt comparison to the restricted roles women were forced to endure within the world of art production. Women were consistently told to be nice (don't exceed your proper role as a lady; forego artistic production), loyal (to a father, husband, family), constant (do not aspire to what is neither attainable, such as an education, or the status of genius), and always present (but unchallenging in their accepted role as the second sex). To succeed, women had to fit these requirements, so much so that Beauvoir was criticized by women themselves who were, she argued, complicit in their own oppression. Although the gambler commands, he also plays up his vulnerability–“the best I can do is pray.” This conjures up the many male artists who looked to women as artistic muses, and bemoaned female capriciousness—“I know the way you've treated other guys you've been with.” However, ultimately, the heroic male artist aimed to control women, keep them at his side, and have them bestow luck. Woman is the agent who insures luck for others, but is herself neither the recipient nor the agent who acts on her own behalf: a crucial distinction. It seems then, that we have come full circle such that Lady Luck has been supplanted by the Man of Luck. The small number of women who succeeded in creating art through the centuries were exceptional rule‐breakers and subversive agents of change who were seen as aberrations to the natural order of male over female, mind over body, reason over emotion. They were often regarded as mentally ill, hysterical, and even deserving of confinement, as was the case for Camille Claudel, model and lover of Rodin, who at age twenty‐nine (in 1913) was committed by her family to a psychiatric hospital where she lived for the next thirty years.101 Women suffered exclusion, discrimination, and ridicule. Some of the women who created the 100,000 prints in the Library of Congress may have succeeded, but this was in spite of the obstacles placed in their way. Making prints may have been one way to attain some measure of visibility and artistic achievement, but the meager number of women in permanent museum collections, and the low monetary value of their work, still attest to their struggle. Thus I offer these recommendations for the new school of creativity researchers: They should expand their work to include examples of women's art. They should acknowledge and study roles of gender, race, and other factors in creativity and collaboration. They should retire the outdated stereotype of the lone, male genius. Finally, they should open the debate to more enlightened versions of the concept of originality that focus on revised standards of aesthetic merit. What is at risk here? Women's prints might rise in value, thus costing more, but for the sake of a fairer and deeper philosophical and psychological analysis of what counts as the creative impulse and the passion for making art, it would be worth the investment. Footnotes 1. Gabriel Austin, “Alice in Dali‐Land,” The Print Collector's Newsletter 3:2 (May–June 1972), pp. 25–26. The author was described as the head of the Book Department of the Parke‐Bernet Galleries and regular contributor to the newsletter. Four additional short essays appeared in this volume and stand as a milestone on the topic of originality within the field of professional print collecting. I am grateful to Christy Mag Uidhir and printmaker Jamie Ellen Davis for this and other references that brought the controversial history of the concept of “originality” within the field of professional printmaking to my attention. 2. The song was written by Frank Loesser in 1950 and was featured in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. http://www.metrolyrics.com/printlyric/luck‐be‐a‐lady‐lyrics‐frank‐sinatra.html. 3. For example, printmaking was omitted from at least two anthologies with sections on different art forms: Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2003) and David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, eds., Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997). 4. Austin, “Alice in Dali‐Land,” p. 26. 5. Bence Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 17–35. 6. I draw initial attention to the terms ‘master print’ and ‘master printer’ due to their associations with masculinity as well as whiteness (within the context of American slavery); note that feminist theorists have criticized both notions of “masters” and “masterpieces” of art. See, for example, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; new edition, London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996). 7. “What Is a Print?” The International Fine Print Dealers Association, at http://www.ifpda.org/content/collecting_prints/basics. 8. Pat Gilmour, “The Curious Pavane: Tamarind and the Art of Collaboration,” in Tamarind: Forty Years, ed. Marjorie Devon (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), pp. 37–59, at p. 49. Gilmour is also the author of Ken Tyler, Master Printer, and the American Print Renaissance (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1986). 9. Gilmour, “The Curious Pavane,” p. 51. 10. Print Council of America (527 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.), Prints? What Is an Original Print, 1961, 1964. Source: Handbook of Audubon Prints (4th edition) by Lois Elmer Bannon and Taylor Clark (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 1998), p. 58. The Print Council claimed that the definition was both widely accepted and complied with the standards set up in 1960 by The International Association of Plastic Arts, Unesco House, Paris. 11. Richard Field, “On Originality,” The Print Collector's Newsletter 3:2 (May–June 1972): 26–28. 12. Field, “On Originality,” p. 27. 13. This shift embodied a uniquely American reaction to French printmaking trends that was expressed by the only dissenting voice among the four authors in the 1972 journal publication, that of Hubert Prouté, “On Originality,” The Print Collector's Newsletter 3:2 (May–June 1972), pp. 25–29, at p. 28, who argued for the old 1960s Print Council of America definition (with the one exception for “partial use of photo‐mechanical processes”), citing its history back to a 1937 definition from the Comité National de la Gravure and the Chambre Syndicale de l'Estampe, du Dessin et du Tableau. 14. Field, “On Originality,” p. 27. 15. Vivien Raynor, “Art Review; When Art (the Artist's) Meets Art (the Printer's), The New York Times, May 28, 1995, sec. 2, p. 22; http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/28/nyregion/art‐review‐when‐art‐the‐artist‐s‐meets‐art‐the‐printer‐s.html. The reviewer portrays most art viewers as “unwilling or unable” to appreciate the subtleties of printmaking techniques, the requisite knowledge, and the specialized role of the technician in the creative process. 16. Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), p. 150 as found at http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=67799. 17. Jaklyn Babington, “Robert Rauschenberg: 1967–1978” at http://www.nga.gov.au/Rauschenberg/. The text accompanied an exhibition of Rauschenberg's work at the National Gallery of Australia in 2007–2008. Interestingly, Rauschenberg became known for collaborating with many other artists, printmakers, papermakers, and composers such as his friend, avant‐garde composer John Cage. 18. Colleen Terry, “Forty Years of Keith,” Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Blog, http://deyoung.famsf.org/blog/forty‐years‐keith. 19. “What Is Tamarind Institute?” at http://tamarind.unm.edu/about‐us/2‐what‐is‐tamarind‐institute. TLW was fully funded by the Ford Foundation until its move to the University of New Mexico under the name of the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in 1970. 20. June Wayne, “On Originality,” The Print Collector's Newsletter 3:2 (May–June 1972), pp. 28–29. 21. Wayne, “On Originality,” p. 29. 22. Austin, “Alice in Dali‐Land,” p. 26. 23. “History,” The International Fine Print Dealers Association, at http://www.ifpda.org/content/collecting_prints/basics. 24. “History,” The International Fine Print Dealers Association. It is worth noting that readers are directed to the IFPDA website for this definition by the website of the Print Council of America—the organization who originally published “What Is an Original Print?” in 1961. The IFPDA definition, one assumes, is the final word—for now—on the meaning of ‘original print.’ 25. Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 213. Explaining the pre‐twentieth century devaluing of Native American artifacts as inferior craft or applied art, the authors cite the influence of Immanuel Kant's theory “that functionality limited the ‘highest’ capacity of a work of art to achieve formal beauty and to express ideas”; landmark exhibitions of Native work did not take place until the 1920s and 1930s (pp. 15–16). 26. Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art, p. 212. 27. Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art, p. 167. For information on James Houston, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Archibald_Houston. 28. Berlo and Phillips, Native North American Art, p. 166. 29. According to the website http://museumofinuitartblog.wordpress.com/tag/kenojuak‐ashevak/, the image was made popular by its appearance on a commemorative postage stamp in 1970 celebrating the centennial anniversary of the North West Territories. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenojuak_Ashevak. My thanks to Cynthia Freeland for this example, evidence of her interest in the artist's work over the years. 30. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 31. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women's Press, 1984). See also “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, chap. 2; and Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman: A Celebration in Words and Images of Traditional American Art and the Women Who Made It (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979). 32. Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, p. 25. 33. Charles Sterling, “A Fine ‘David’ Reattributed,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 9:5 (January, 1951), p. 124. The debate continues with the attribution of the work as a possible self‐portrait of another woman, Nisa Villers, currently held to be the most plausible option. See Liana De Girolami Cheney, Alicia Craig Faxon, and Kathleen Lucey Russo, Self‐Portraits by Women Painters (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000), p. 128–129. 34. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party Comes to Brooklyn Museum,” The New York Times, October 17, 1980, sec. C, pp. 1, 18. 35. Writings on and by Judy Chicago are extensive; see her websites, http://www.throughtheflower.org/judychicago and http://www.judychicago.com/. See also Edward Lucie‐Smith (on Red Flag), Judy Chicago: An American Vision (New York: Watson‐Guptill, 2000), pp. 35–37; ACA Galleries, Judy Chicago: Fragments from the Delta of Venus and other FemmErotica: A Thirty‐Five Year Survey (2004); and Judy Chicago, Fragments from the Delta of Venus (New York: PowerHouse, 2004). The latter contains art and introduction by Judy Chicago based on text selections from Anaïs Nin, author of Delta of Venus (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1977; first published in 1969). Nin began writing pornography for her friend and ex‐lover, Henry Miller, beginning in the 1940s for payment of one dollar a page. Chicago bases her visual representations on Nin's unprecedented textual explorations of female sexuality and pleasure. Nin was, incidentally, Chicago's mentor. 36. See Chicago's two volumes of autobiography: Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York: Penguin, 1993) and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (New York: Viking, 1996). 37. See Peg Zeglin Brand, “The Aesthetic Attitude in The Ethics of Ambiguity,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 18 (2001–2002): 31–48. 38. The Library of Congress, “American Women: Fine Prints,” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awpnp6/fineprintl.html. This is opposed to another characterization of the collection under the rubric, “Depictions of Women,” that reinforces a more standard viewer expectation about women's role in art—whereby women function as subject matter throughout the history of Western art, primarily as images of idealized beauty and as symbols of motherhood (many of the latter executed by Cassatt herself). 39. The Library of Congress, “American Women: Fine Prints.” 40. The Library of Congress, “American Women: Fine Prints.” 41. See Elizabeth G. Seaton, ed., Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists 1910–1960 (Manhattan, KS: Marianna Kistler Beach Museum, Kansas State University, 2006). 42. For recent numbers on women artists and the devaluing of their artworks within the mainstream of the artworld, see my essay, “The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) and Its Significance for Feminist Aesthetics,” in Feminist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art: Critical Visions, Creative Engagements (New York: Springer, forthcoming). One can measure the numbers in various ways; women comprised 64% of fine art/studio college majors in 2013 according to the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) at http://snaap.indiana.edu/snaapshot/#disciplines. But in 2011 the average New York gallery—including over 77% of the Chelsea galleries which represent more diverse, younger artists—represented 75%–96% male artists; only 5% of galleries represented males and females in equal numbers; and artworks found in public museums were 95% male. See Brian Sherwin, “Art & Prejudice: Dealing with Sexism, Racism, and Ageism in the Art World,” Fine Art Views (February, 19, 2011) at http://faso.com/fineartviews/27887. 43. See, in particular, Paul Guyer, “Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality,” as well as other essays in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 116–137. 44. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 30. 45. Philip Alperson, “Creativity in Art,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 245–257, at p. 255. 46. Heidi Grasswick, “Feminist Social Epistemology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2013), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/feminist‐social‐epistemology/. 47. For a brief overview of originality, see George Bailey, “Originality,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition, eds. Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009), pp. 457–459. I forego the opportunity to discuss particular theories that Bailey covers that argue that originality is not an aesthetic value alone but only in relation to an artwork's total aesthetic or artistic value (those of Jack Meiland and Alvin Goldman) or that originality is an aesthetic value only within a context of some theory of art (those of Dabney Townsend and Francis Sparshott). 48. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 19. 49. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford University Press, 1938) and later Monroe C. Beardsley, “On the Creation of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (1965): 291–304, and John Hospers, “The Concept of Artistic Expression,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (January 1954): 313–344. 50. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 1980); Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” and George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” both reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1995), pp. 201–223. I am indebted to Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston for this overview in their “Introduction: The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives,” in The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–31, at p. 5. 51. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, eds., The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). 52. Paul and Kaufman, “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity,” The Philosophy of Creativity, pp. 3–14, at pp. 3–5. The authors actually cite four texts as “very important work on creativity in the last few decades” but do not discuss any individual theories, concluding that “‘the philosophy of creativity’ is still a neologism in most quarters” (p. 4). Cited are The Idea of Creativity, eds. Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley (Boston, MA: Brill, 2009); The Creation of Art, eds. Gaut and Livingston; Dimensions of Creativity, ed. Margaret A. Boden (MIT Press, 1994); and Margaret A. Boden, Creativity and Art; Three Roads to Surprise (Oxford University Press, 2010). 53. Gaut and Livingston, “Introduction,” p. 1. 54. Paul and Kaufman, “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity,” pp. 4–5. 55. Robert S. Albert and Mark A. Runco, “A History of Research on Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 16–31, at p. 17. 56. Paul and Kaufman, “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity,” p. 5. 57. Simon Blackburn, “Creativity and Not‐So‐Dumb Luck,” in The Philosophy of Creativity, pp. 147–156. 58. Matthew Kieran, “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in The Philosophy of Creativity, pp. 125–146. 59. For a variety of philosophical overviews of this history and current state of scholarship, see Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Feminist Aesthetics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2012), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/feminism‐aesthetics/; A.W. Eaton, “Feminist Standpoint Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, pp. 272–275; Peg Zeglin Brand, “Feminist Aesthetics,” and “Feminist Criticism,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, pp. 267–272; A.W. Eaton, “Feminist Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Compass, 3 (2008): 873–893; Peg Zeglin Brand, “Feminism and Aesthetics,” in The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 254–265; Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics; Peg Brand and Mary Devereaux, eds., “Women, Art, and Aesthetics,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18 (Fall/Winter 2003). 60. A.W. Eaton, “What's Wrong with the (Female) Nude?” in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, eds. Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 277–308. Eaton argues that women have been intentionally disenfranchised and systematically excluded from the artistic canon. Evidence includes numbers gathered by The Guerrilla Girls chronicling the inclusion of women in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1989, less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections were women but 85% of the nudes were women. In 2004 the numbers were 3% and 83% respectively and in 2011, 4% and 76%. See Guerilla Girls, “Naked Through the Ages” at http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/nakedthroughtheages.shtml. 61. See, for example, Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (Munich: Prestel, 2007), and Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 2007). 62. See Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Indiana University Press, 1989) and for a look at Julia Kristeva's updated notion, see Alison E. Jasper, Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius (Baylor University Press, 2012). Carol Duncan chastised The Museum of Modern Art for its influential art‐historical narrative of mythic male painters—even after they enlarged the permanent collection in 1984—in her landmark essay, “The MoMA's Hot Mamas,” Art Journal 48 (Summer 1989) 171–178. See also Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) and Hilde Hein, Museums and Public Art: A Feminist Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Book Store, 2014). Coincidentally, a new report issued by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada; see Hilarie M. Sheets, “Study Finds a Gender Gap at the Top Museums,” New York Times (March 7, 2014) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/arts/design/study‐finds‐a‐gender‐gap‐at‐the‐top‐museums.html?smid=pl‐share&_r=1. 63. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Aesthetics: Feminism's Hidden Impact,” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 13 (Fall 2013): 8–11. 64. Korsmeyer, “Aesthetics: Feminism's Hidden Impact,” 9–10. 65. Virginia Woolf's original talks date from 1928 and are published in A Room of One's Own (Burlingame, CA and New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957). 66. See, for example, Anne Donchin, “Feminist Bioethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2012), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminist‐bioethics/. 67. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 19. 68. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” pp. 26–33. 69. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 19. 70. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 23. Among other works, Nanay cites Margaret Boden, “What Is Creativity?” in Dimensions of Creativity, ed. Margaret Boden (MIT Press, 1994), pp. 75–118 and The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (New York: Basic, 1991). 71. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 23. 72. Gilmour, “The Curious Pavane: Tamarind and the Art of Collaboration,” p. 42. At 11%, women numbered 26 out of 236. 73. I am reminded of art students who argue against the study of art history in order to keep their creative thoughts “pure” and “unencumbered;” such ignorance feeds the self‐confident delusion that one is indeed creative. 74. Arthur C. Danto, “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, eds. George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), p. 35. The essay was originally published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1964. 75. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 20. 76. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 24. In a footnote, Nanay carefully explains the distinctive nature of his condition, as opposed to Boden's which it resembles. 77. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 24, footnote 8. 78. David Novitz, “Explanations of Creativity,” in The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives, pp. 174–191; Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” pp. 24–25. 79. Field, “On Originality,” p. 27. Apropos the interpersonal dynamics of artistic collaboration, Judy Chicago routinely collaborated with china painters, textile artists, and needle workers, for example, for The Dinner Party and The Birth Project. Film footage of interactions during the making of The Dinner Party demonstrates the inseparability of ideas during a collaborative process but also Chicago's overall artistic control. 80. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 33. 81. See Korsmeyer, “Gendered Concepts and Hume's Standard of Taste,” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, pp. 49–65. Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2012), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminism‐epistemology/. 82. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edition (Hampshire, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). First edition was published in 1989. 83. Maes and Levinson, eds., Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays. 84. Brand, “Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (Summer 2006): 167–189. 85. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany‐Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). First published 1949. 86. Corcoran Gallery of Art, “Corcoran Presents Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration,” news release, http://www.corcoran.org/pdfs/ChuckClosePR.pdf 87. I am indebted to Christy Mag Uidhir for this helpful suggestion. 88. Nanay, “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” p. 25. 89. Blackburn, “Creativity and Not‐So‐Dumb Luck,” pp. 151, 155. 90. Even in the twenty‐first century, Judy Chicago argues that female art students are still routinely ill‐prepared for professional life. See her critique of art schools and studio art education at the college level where she argues that women's lack of self‐confidence is only one factor that diminishes their creative output after they leave the academy and impedes their transition to a professional studio lifestyle, in Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education (New York: Monicelli Press, 2014). 91. Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction, p. 3. 92. Kieran, “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” p. 127. 93. Nancy Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 25, cites Aristotle's Generation of Animals 737a 27–28. 94. Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy, p. 26. 95. Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy, p. 27. 96. Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy, pp. 28–29. 97. Kieran, “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” pp. 128–132. 98. Kieran, “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” p. 136. 99. The ancient goddess Fortuna turned the Wheel of Fortune (or Rota Fotunae) to determine one's fate; see “Rota Fortunae,” Wikipedia, last modified June 11, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae. See also Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. T.G. Bergin (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1947), p. 75; see chap. 25: “I will say that in my opinion it is better to be bold than cautious, for fortune is a woman and whoever wishes to win her must importune and beat her, and we may observe that she is more frequently won by this sort than by those who proceed more deliberately. Like a woman, too, she is well disposed to young men, for they are less circumspect and more violent and more bold to command her.” 100. “Luck Be a Lady Lyrics,” MetroLyrics, http://www.metrolyrics.com/printlyric/luck‐be‐a‐lady‐lyrics‐frank‐sinatra.html. 101. Odile Ayral‐Clause, Camille Claudel: A Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002). © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - The Role of Luck in Originality and Creativity
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12136
DA - 2015-01-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-role-of-luck-in-originality-and-creativity-Ov0f0VPLtE
SP - 31
EP - 55
VL - 73
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -