ART AS PERFORMANCE, by David Davies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 278 pp.

If we accepted the claims that David Davies makes in his Art as Performance, we would have to rigorously revise our conception of what kinds of entities artworks are. Art as Performance is a study in the ontology of art, and whereas other well-known theories about the ontological status of artworks say that artworks are to be identified with, for example, types, classes, or kinds, Davies holds that they are performances that lead to the production of a "focus of appreciation" — the latter being the objects we usually take to be artworks. So according to Davies, a painting presented in a museum or a novel we can buy in a bookshop is in fact not the artwork x. The artwork is rather the performance that cumulate in bringing x into existence.

Michael Weh
Department of Philosophy
The University of St. Andrews