Edward Sankowski, in a paper published recently in this journal ('Free action, social institutions, and the definition of "Art"', Philosophical Studies 37 [1980], pp. 67-79), gave an interesting discussion of George Dickie's claim that a work of art must be an artifact. Sankowski says the following: I wish to maintain that Dickie is right in making artifacthood a necessary condition of artwordhood [presumably 'artworldhood' but incorrect in applying the notion of artifacthood so loosely that he considers simply displaying x, or holding x up for appreciation to constitute x as an artifact. 1 Actually, Dickie does not say that artifacthood is a necessary condition of 'artworldhood'; he says that it is a necessary condition for something's being a work of art. There are, after all, lots of things to which 'artworldhood' (understOod as 'being part of the artwofld') might be ascribed which are not artifacts -Zubin Metha, for example. But we can ignore this slip, since Sankowski usually puts the matter in the right way. We can then distinguish two claims which Sankowski is making in the passage I just quoted: (i) Artifacthood is a necessary condition for something's being a work of art; (ii) Dickie has misunderstood the notion of artifact. I will deal with these claims in reverse order.
Dickie holds that you can make something an artifact by showing it to someone or hanging it on the wall. Thus he says that "the artffactuality is conferred on the object rather than worked on it ''2. Sankowski, however, disagrees with this. "I maintain", he writes, "that when right-thinking people talk about artifacts they are talking about objects that have been 'worked on' in some relatively confmed sense" (p. 70). But although Sankowski may maintain that this is correct, he does not argue that it is correct. Careful examination of his paper reveals that he argues only that works of art must be 'worked on', and thus that a piece of driftwood hung over the mantle cannot be a work of art. Such arguments, even if succesful, do not show that a piece of driftwood hung over the mantle cannot be an artifact, and that is all that Philosophical Studies 38 (1980) 385-389.