Currie argues that an art work is not an object that the artist creates, but an act that the artist performs. The finished product that we normally identify with the work is just one of two constitutive elements of the work, the other being the way in which the artist arrived at the finished product. This second element, the work's "heuristic", must be specified in terms of the artist's solution for technical and conceptual problems against a background of artistic tradition and convention. Rejecting Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts, and the dualistic ontology based on it, Currie attempts to construct a unified theory of the exemplification of art works. The book is aimed at philosophers, aestheticians and historians of art. Gregory Currie is the author of "Frege: An Introduction to his Philosophy" and has also published articles in various philosophy journals. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Sydney.
