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This lecture presents the text of the speech about artists and craftsmen in the late Bronze Age of China delivered by the author at the 2007 Elsley Zeitlyn Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Culture held at the British Academy. It describes dramatic changes in the arts that took place around the turn of the fourth century bc which deeply affected the nature of artistic creation, and provides examples drawn from two major artistic categories of artistic production, lacquer and bronze.

This chapter argues that there is a dimension of ontology that exceeds the limits of the ontogenetic problematic. Difference and Repetition sets the transcendental field as the realm of Ideas. Immanence is transcendence itself that is transcendent to the immanence within which it unfolds. Gilles Deleuze's use of the concept of expression in A Thousand Plateaus is entirely consistent with that of Expressionism, and aims to define the same process. It then describes the stratification, and highlights the fact that Deleuze associates it with a process of transcendence. In addition to the plane of organisation and development, and as the plane from which it grows, Deleuze is concerned to draw an altogether different plane, namely, the plane of consistency, or immanence. It is noted that philosophy is more akin to artistic creation.

This chapter examines moral rights in two contrasting manifestations of information technology. First, it discusses the place of moral rights in works of new technology that are now accepted subject-matter for copyright protection. It looks at the paradigmatic case of computer software and databases. Second, it explores the collision of new technology with the world of the arts and considers three aspects of the problem. It considers the moral rights implications of new kinds of artistic works; creative works that are created by new technological methods; and artistic creation that represents a combination of the two. In many ways, information technology represents a test case for moral rights in the digital context. Computer software has been integrated whole heartedly into copyright law. At the same time, software and related technologies challenge copyright at a fundamental level.

This chapter summarizes the book’s central claims and looks at paths for future work on the applied ethics of artistic creation and ethical criticism. It suggests the need for two parallel strands of inquiry: On the one hand, as the term “applied ethics” suggests, there is a need for a finer-grained understanding of both the artistic and ethical contexts of artistic creation—an understanding that will need to be informed by research across a number of fields, including anthropology, art history, and moral psychology. On the other hand, whatever details of that context are revealed by this fine-grained analysis, there will be a more abstract conceptual challenge about how to reconcile the norms of that art-historical and ethical context with those in currency in the art-historical and ethical context from which one is judging the work. So, the parallel path of inquiry is in metaethics.

This chapter summarizes the methods, arguments, and contents of the overall book. It outlines the central considerations in support of the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art. It claims that judgments of an artwork’s ethical value are often made (and often should be made) in terms of how it was created and, furthermore, that this is in part because some art forms more readily lend themselves to this form of ethical appraisal. In addition, the chapter claims that among the ways in which we ethically criticize art, this production-oriented approach more often leads to practical consequences (censure, dismissal, prosecution, legislation) because its claim to objectivity is less contested than that of other sorts of ethical criticism.

This chapter looks at Agnès Varda, who has been associated with films that explore the boundaries between documentary and fiction. She likes to blend reflections on the world we live in with a more aesthetic personal enquiry on artistic creation. The chapter focuses on Varda's most commercially successful film since the New Wave, Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985). This is an important film on many counts: despite its small budget, it has been widely distributed, unlike many of Varda's other films which are still viewed as marginal in form and content; it has been extensively discussed critically for its original engagement with a non-linear narrative structure and as an example of Varda's unique method of 'cinécriture', which links writing and film-making; and it addresses important social issues and themes, including a meditation on homelessness and freedom in modern society, which marks the engagement of the film-maker with the real world. In addition, Sans toit ni loi is an example of women's film-making, which illustrates the role played by Varda in making the feminine perspective more visible. Since she has sometimes referred to herself as a feminist, the chapter also outlines some feminist Film Studies responses to Sans toit ni loi.

This chapter examines the theory and purpose of moral rights and explores moral rights in the digital context. The doctrine of moral rights aims to protect the author from suffering the consequences of moral, intellectual, or spiritual harm inflicted on him through the mistreatment of his work. In the Digital Age, the doctrine of moral rights faces three kinds of challenges. First, copyright law has become the primary form of legal regulation governing new technologies. Second, new technologies and artistic creation can overlap and present conflicting issues. For example, a computer program, itself protected by copyright law as a literary work, is additionally designed to generate a work of art. Third, new technologies have also made it possible for members of the public to intervene in creative works in a new way, making seamless and imperceptible changes.

This chapter explores the role of intention in debates on animals creating art, the autonomy and mastery of the art-producing animal, and assumptions of exceptionality and intention rather than instinct in artistic creation.