In Defence of Tourists

SPECIAL ISSUE RESEARCH ARTICLE In Defence of Tourists Michel-Antoine Xhignesse Capilano University, CA ABSTRACT It is not uncommon for art historians and philosophers of art to deride the kinds of aesthetic experiences tourists seek out by characterizing them as bowing to the will of the herd, succumbing to peer pressure, or simply seeking out what is popular. Two charges, in particular, tend to be levelled against tourists. The first, which I call the motivation problem, contends that tourists are motivated to seek out aesthetic experiences for the wrong kinds of reasons. The second, which I call the appreciation problem, maintains that tourist tastes are aesthetically uninformed and are thus the inauthentic product of aesthetic luck. But there is a better way of thinking about aesthetic tourism, one that can capture both the tourist’s motivations and the role of aesthetic luck. I argue that aesthetic tourists, like many experts, subscribe to the acquaintance principle, and that doing so generates aesthetic obligations to their practical identity. The tourist, in the end, is no more – and no less – a product of aesthetic luck than the expert connoisseur. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Michel-Antoine Xhignesse Capilano University, CA michelxhignesse@ capilanou.ca KEYWORDS: tourism; acquaintance principle; aesthetic judgement; aesthetic experience; aesthetic normativity TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Xhignesse, Michel-Antoine. ‘In Defence of Tourists.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no. 2 (2023): pp. 176–192. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.33134/eeja.343 177Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 I. TWO PROBLEMS Nobody likes a tourist. They walk slowly and gawk openly, clog venues, and lead to significant price hikes. Some might be thought to be especially bad: those who flock to major metropolitan centres to see the famous art, sometimes even to the exclusion of nearby pieces that experts judge to be of higher aesthetic merit. Such gawkers are aesthetic tourists: people who do not ordinarily take a significant interest in art or its history, or in nature and her breathtaking vistas, but who nevertheless, when leisure and money afford, seek out popular aesthetic experiences. Consider the Mona Lisa (c.1503–1506), which is just another Leonardo in the Louvre, and one of the museum’s smallest paintings to boot. The portrait is of some aesthetic interest for its early use of aerial perspective and for showing the subject in front of an imaginary landscape, but it owes most of its fame and recognition to nineteenthcentury mythmaking and its 1911 theft and return. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is that the crowds it draws make it nearly impossible to properly appreciate the largest painting in the Louvre, which sits on the wall directly opposite: Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1563). It would come as no surprise if most of the Mona Lisa’s gawkers had no idea that Veronese’s superior work was in the Louvre, let alone in the same room. One kind of distinctively aesthetic concern with tourism – call it the motivation problem – stems from the idea that tourists are motivated by the wrong kinds of reasons, as evidenced by the disenchantment so many feel when they finally encounter the authentic object of their pursuit. Umberto Eco, for example, derides tourist sights as sites ‘where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake’.1 Daniel Boorstin likewise characterizes tourists as naïve and gullible, arguing that ‘[t]he tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him often unintelligible) product of the foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations’.2 Somewhat more recently, Allen Carlson has bemoaned the fact that tourists appreciate nature primarily through the lens of the picturesque, and thus appreciate the natural world ‘primarily in light of renderings of nature typical of travel brochures, calendar photos, and picture postcards’.3 According to a second kind of concern – call it the appreciation problem – tourist tastes are aesthetically uninformed; tourists tend to settle for ‘easier’ and less valuable aesthetic experiences. Two closely related vices fall under this banner: (1) evincing popular (that is, unsophisticated) taste, and (2) the pursuit of popular taste at the expense (that is, to the detriment) of more aesthetically valuable works and experiences. A common historical formulation has it that the masses are simply incapable of properly appreciating High Art, since such aesthetic experiences come with difficulty and training. Here, for example, is Schopenhauer: [T]he most excellent works of every art, the noblest products of genius, will always and necessarily remain closed books for the obtuse majority, 1 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1983), 8. 2 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 106. 3 Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000), 4. 178Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 inaccessible to them and separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of the prince is inaccessible to the rabble.4 The appreciation problem’s roots lie in class prejudice, and the advent of affordable global transit has ensured that today’s tourists are mostly from the ‘obtuse majority’ rather than the cultured elite. A second, related formulation maintains that ordinary folk prefer ‘easy’ aesthetic experiences, no doubt because they are aesthetically uninformed. Clement Greenberg, for instance, infamously derided ‘kitsch’ and its popular appeal for ‘using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture’,5 adding that: The peasant finds no ‘natural’ urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort.6 For Greenberg, ‘the folk’ simply lack the desire or the intellectual wherewithal to appreciate the objects of highest aesthetic value. Finally, in much the same vein, Virginia Woolf attacked what she called ‘middlebrow’ taste: We highbrows, I agree, have to earn our livings; but when we have earned enough to live on, then we live. When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy – what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; […] but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter […] for to buy living art requires living taste.7 According to Woolf, tourists might, in principle, be capable of appreciating highgrade aesthetic objects but, lacking ‘taste’, they do not do so. Even Cain Todd, who is generally sympathetic to aesthetic tourism, concedes that many touristic experiences are less rich and rewarding, and less intrinsically valuable, than their more serious analogues, thanks to conventional notions of the picturesque and the superficiality of touristic engagement.8 None of these critics stoops so low as to deny that tourists have their reasons; what they lament is the quality of the tourist’s reasons, which are reduced to ignorance and poor taste. But what explains the imperative a tourist feels to seek out these first-personal experiences, often at non-negligible personal cost and despite the easy availability of high-quality epistemic analogues such as photographs? If the 4 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (1818; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 260. 5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 10. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 120. 8 Cain Samuel Todd, ‘Nature, Beauty and Tourism’, in Philosophical Issues in Tourism, ed. John Tribe (Toronto: Channel View, 2009), 154–70. 179Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 tourist’s aesthetic engagement is largely superficial, then this seems puzzling: why would anyone invest in a trip to foreign parts to spend a few seconds in front of a tiny painting they can hardly see for all the other people jostling to catch a glimpse of it? I will argue that there is a more generous way of thinking about aesthetic tourism, and of answering the charges brought by the motivation and appreciation problems. I begin, in Section II, by arguing that we can do a much better job of capturing the tourist’s thinking, and what is at stake for them, if we recognize that tourists conceive of the relevant aesthetic experiences as being important to their practical identities. A ‘practical identity’ is a contingent description of one’s actions and one’s life that offers a rationale for their pursuit as worthwhile endeavours.9 Under such a self-conception, certain obligations follow which, if unfulfilled, threaten a significant personal loss.10 I will argue that, although tourist and expert alike seek out aesthetic experiences, their different practical identities yield different aesthetic obligations that require different kinds of propitiation. In Section III I flesh out this account of the tourist’s motivations by suggesting that tourists may be driven to seek out first-personal aesthetic experiences by an underlying commitment to what Richard Wollheim called the acquaintance principle, which posits that judgements of aesthetic value (1) are largely intransmissible, and so (2) must be based on first-hand experience.11 It is all well and good to see pictures of the Grand Canyon or the Mona Lisa, but the tourist suspects that they are missing out unless they see them live and in situ. Only a direct acquaintance with the object, they think, can communicate the full range of its aesthetic properties and thus fulfil the demands of their practical identity. Armed with these responses to the motivation problem, I turn my attention in Sections IV and V to the appreciation problem, arguing that aesthetic expertise matters a great deal less than we might think. In Section IV, I argue that the tourist’s appreciation of stereotypical aesthetic experiences is not, in fact, an appreciative vice; it is a perfectly acceptable response on the part of someone whose practical identity is not that of an artworld insider. Finally, in Section V I argue that we should not place too high a premium on experts’ appreciation of high-grade aesthetic experiences because their judgements are every bit as subject to aesthetic luck as those of non-experts. II. AESTHETIC OBLIGATIONS The natural answer to the motivation problem is simply to deny that tourists are motivated by the wrong kinds of reasons in the first place. If their reasons look wrong from the perspective of aesthetic experts, it is because we misunderstand the tourist’s goals, mistaking them for mirrors of our own (qua experts). One natural place to start looking for an account of tourists’ motivations is with the notion of aesthetic obligations. Many philosophers of art think that aesthetic properties – primarily beauty – have deontic force, that is, that aesthetic properties make some kind of demand on audiences. The salient question, however, is just how 9 Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101. 10 This not to say that we cannot or do not shed some practical identities and adopt others over time (ibid., 120). 11 Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (1980; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 156. 180Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 aesthetic properties make these demands of us. One possibility is that we owe the work or its author a particular kind of engagement and response. Film critics such as Mark Kermode, for example, think audiences should refrain from texting or talking in the cinema, even when they are alone in a screening, out of respect for the film and the people who made it. If there are aesthetic obligations, and if they attach to works and authors, then it may well be that we owe it to the Mona Lisa – or to Leonardo – to see it. Some – perhaps even many – aestheticians and other artworld experts are likely to be moved by such a view, but it seems much less likely to command widespread assent outside such circles. What we are looking for, instead, is an account of the tourist’s motivations that will be recognizable to her. A more promising explanation of the deontic force of aesthetic reasons does not rely on aesthetic properties being special in any way, or on obligations to inanimate works, abstract ideals, or distant authors. The relational strategy takes aesthetic obligations to be grounded in duties we have towards someone or something in virtue of our practical identities. That is to say, aesthetic obligations derive from the role aesthetic considerations play in our practical identities, rather than from some normative relation we bear to aesthetic objects as such, or some special weight which aesthetic considerations have. This relational strategy has been articulated in several different ways. Robbie Kubala, for example, argues that aesthetic obligations take the form of promises towards ourselves.12 Aesthetic obligations thus concern aesthetic objects but are not obligations to those objects themselves. On Kubala’s model, obligations take the form of a threeplace relation between an obligor (A), an obligee (B), and the content of the obligation (C), such that we can say that ‘B owes it to A to C’.13 So, for example, we might say that a tenant (B) owes it to their landlord (A) to pay the rent (C). In the aesthetic realm, however, obligor and obligee are often one and the same; thus, we might say that an avid metalhead (B) owes it to herself (A) to see Iron Maiden live, or that a child who loved Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone owes it to herself to read its six sequels. Such obligations all prominently feature aesthetic objects, but the obligation itself is neither directed towards nor generated by those objects. The source of the obligation, rather, is one’s practical identity; it is agents’ conceptions of themselves – qua metalheads or qua Potterheads – that generate aesthetic obligations, and agents merely owe it to themselves, in light of that self-conception, to perform the requisite actions. The result is a series of obligations that are conditional and non-universal in form.14 Agents need only attend to objects that play an important, constitutive role in their self-conception, and to fail with respect to one of these obligations is to threaten the integrity of the agent’s self-conception, but that is as far as the wrongdoing goes. Anthony Cross suggests, instead, that an aesthetic obligation is as an obligation incurred by virtue of standing in a particular relationship to some individual – such as a loving relationship.15 So: our metalhead incurs an obligation to see Iron Maiden live because she loves their music; our Potterhead must read the sequels because she loved the first book; and so on. Aesthetic obligations are thus incurred by first developing relationships to particular works, artists, or genres, so that they become 12 Robbie Kubala, ‘Grounding Aesthetic Obligations’, British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2018): 271–85. 13 Ibid., 273. 14 Ibid., 275. 15 Anthony Cross, ‘Obligations to Artworks as Duties of Love’, Estetika 54 (2017): 85–101. 181Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 valuable to our practical identities in some way, and, second, our making some further commitment to them. Finally, Andrew McGonigal argues that aesthetic obligations are incurred by our commitment to integrity: we have a duty towards ourselves to honour and authentically express our actual aesthetic preferences, and we can do so by seeking out more of the same experiences, or experiences that express, reflect, or sharpen our practical identities.16 The relational model thus grounds aesthetic obligations in a commitment we have towards ourselves in virtue of how we conceive of ourselves and our actions. This may or may not yield a holistic account of aesthetic obligation as such.17 Nevertheless, it clearly identifies a species of obligation we experience as compelling, even if we sometimes allow ourselves to fall short, or if our commitment to a particular practical identity is not life-long. And that, I think, is all we need to mount a defence of aesthetic tourism. There is some empirical evidence for the relational model of aesthetic obligation in studies of museum and gallery visits, though these are not specific to tourists. In their landmark study of French museums and galleries, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, and Dominique Schnapper found that participating in cultural activities positively reinforces a person’s self-image, and that social class has a significant effect on people’s appetite for culture.18 These results were borne out in a later study of visitors to 10 museums in the United Kingdom, which confirmed the correlation between social class and cultural appetite.19 More interestingly for our purposes, this study found that visitors who cared a great deal about social approval were significantly more interested in an exhibition’s social significance than its subject content, whereas those who cared less about social approval prioritized subject content.20 This is important because tourist experiences are social, and an important part of such social experiences is the consumption of a commodity alongside likeminded others.21 Although tourists care that they are seeing the Mona Lisa, they also care a great deal about the fact that lots of other people are interested in doing the same thing. It reaffirms their sense of the importance and value of their action, and the ambience serves to highlight it as an Experience well outside the ordinary.22 These are the kinds of people who go to the Louvre at least partly to have their picture taken in front of the Mona Lisa, rather than just to see it for themselves; for these tourists, the operative desire is to be perceived as cultured, rather than to improve their aesthetic understanding. In fact, interest in subject content seems strongly related to educational attainment: those without university degrees are far more interested 16 Andrew McGonigal, ‘Aesthetic Reasons’, in The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, ed. Daniel Star (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 908–36. 17 John Dyck argues convincingly that it does not in ‘There Are No Purely Aesthetic Obligations’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (2021): 592–612. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, and Dominique Schnapper, L’amour de l’art: Les musées d’art européens et leur public (Paris: Minuit, 1966). 19 Rita Kottasz, ‘Understanding the Influences of Atmospheric Cues on the Emotional Responses and Behaviours of Museum Visitors’, Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing 16 (2006): 95–121. 20 Ibid., 109. 21 John Urry, ‘The “Consumption” of Tourism’, Sociology 24 (1990): 25. 22 Ibid., 26. 182Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 in the social aspect of the outing than degree-holders, and, among degree-holders, those with postgraduate degrees are the most interested in the exhibition’s subject content.23 These results suggest that casual museumgoers, including tourists, are deeply concerned about their practical identities, but that these are not the same as the art afficionado’s – it is the difference between conceiving of oneself as, say, a museumgoer (an identity that imposes very loose requirements) versus an art afficionado (an identity that demands more, and more specific, propitiation). For the museumgoer, what matters most is the act of going to the museum, rather than the particular aesthetic experiences on offer there. This may seem to sharpen the motivation problem, inviting us to dismiss this class of gawkers as the bad tourists who care more about selfies than aesthetic experiences. But remember that tourists travel for the sake of their aesthetic experiences. We must be careful here not to romanticize tourists – the pursuit of aesthetic experiences is surely seldom their sole motivation for travel. But few things are. What matters is just that the desire for aesthetic experiences features in their deliberations and follows from their self-conception. It would be a shame, after all, to travel to Paris for work but not take the time to visit the Louvre. Depending on the situation one finds oneself in, some motivational attitudes may take a back seat while others are reinforced by what one is doing, just as some practical identities may be shed or reinforced over time, as our circumstances change and as we reflect on our values. This suggests a simple answer to the motivation problem: we have mistaken the motivations at issue. Tourist and aesthete alike are concerned with articulating and reinforcing their practical identities, but each has a different practical identity. The ordinary tourist is looking for a good time with friends and family, but this hardly precludes aesthetic self-improvement. The ‘bad’ tourist is looking to reinforce an image of themselves but, again, this does not entail that the aesthetic experience is of no consequence to them, or has no effect once had. The expert, by contrast, is hungry to consume more and newer items from the cultural buffet, but this, too, involves prioritizing a facet of their practical identity. It comes as no surprise, then, that they must do slightly different things – engage with their experiences in slightly different ways – to achieve their goals. In much the same way, the Harry Potter stories take on a different significance for the Potterhead than they do for parents reading them to their children, or for literary critics and theorists. It might be replied that we have not yet answered the motivation problem: if tourists seek out art to bolster a facet of their practical identities that pertains to amusement or status, or if they seek it out merely incidentally – when in Rome, and so on – then they are being motivated to seek out art for the wrong reasons. But this misses the point: everyone is motivated to seek out aesthetic experiences by their practical identities, even the experts. It is wildly inappropriate to impose the standards of one practical identity on someone who does not avow that identity. In other words, the motivations at work are perfectly felicitous, and are echoed by the motivational structure that guides aesthetic experts. The problem identified by the motivation problem is not really about motivations, since satisfying the demands of one’s practical identity is a perfectly good – and common – motivation for seeking out aesthetic experiences. If there is a problem, then it attaches either to tourists’ choice of aesthetic objects, or to 23 Kottasz, ‘Understanding’, 108. 183Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 their practical identities. If it is tourists’ choice of aesthetic objects that is problematic, then the so-called motivation problem in fact boils down to the appreciation problem. But if we think that the problem is the tourist’s practical identity… well, while there may well be some aesthetically defective practical identities,24 we should not be too quick to consign the tourist to such company, lest we succumb to a pernicious elitism. III. THE ACQUAINTANCE PRINCIPLE A full-fledged answer to the motivation problem requires some explanation of why it is that aesthetic tourists travel in the first place, as opposed to settling for some reliable – and more readily available – epistemic analogue, such as a picture. The sightseer cannot just stare at posters all day; she has to go to the Grand Canyon for herself. Likewise, the empirical evidence suggests a distinct preference for authentic over inauthentic objects (that is, replicas).25 My contention is that tourists feel this way because they – like most people – subscribe to the acquaintance principle, and this background commitment informs the requirements of their practical identities, as they understand them. According to the acquaintance principle, aesthetic knowledge is intransmissible, and must be had directly. Contemporary philosophers have generally been sceptical of the truth of the acquaintance principle,26 and I share their scepticism; my argument, however, does not require its truth. All it requires is that ordinary people subscribe to it, at least as far as their intuitive (as opposed to reflective) judgements are concerned. And, on this score, there is at least some good evidence that ordinary people privilege the experiential component of their activities in this way: a number of museum studies and meta-analyses have shown that viewing authentic artworks is especially important to visitors, and makes for a particularly satisfying experience.27 Nor must we look far afield to see this belief in action: the staged nature of many tourist spaces suggests as much.28 Or think of the outrage generated by Charles Mudede’s recent suggestion that Notre Dame cathedral’s burned-out husk be 24 King offers the anaesthete in this connection: Alex King, ‘The Amoralist and the Anaesthetic’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (2018): 632–63. 25 Brandy N. Frazier et al., ‘Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-Written Beatles Lyrics: Adults’ Evaluations of Authentic Objects’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (2009): 1–14. 26 See Malcolm Budd, ‘The Acquaintance Principle’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 386–92; Paisley Livingston, ‘On An Apparent Truism in Aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 260–78; Jerrold Levinson, ‘Aesthetic Properties II’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 79 (2005): 211–27; Noël Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience: A Question of Content’, in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 69–96. 27 See Bourdieu, Darbel, and Schnapper, L’amour de l’art; Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1991); Andrew J. Pekarik, Zahava D. Doering, and David A. Karns, ‘Exploring Satisfying Experiences in Museums’, Curator 42 (1999): 152–73; Volker Kirchberg and Martin Tröndle, ‘Experiencing Exhibitions: A Review of Studies on Visitor Experiences in Museums’, Curator 55 (2012): 435–52; Ksenia Kirillova et al., ‘What Makes a Destination Beautiful? Dimensions of Tourist Aesthetic Judgment’, Tourism Management 42 (2014): 282–93. 28 See Dean MacCannell, ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings’, American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 589–603; Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe, ‘The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original through Its Fac-similes’, in Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, ed. Thoma Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 275–97. 184Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 replaced with 3D projections,29 or the controversy over ‘immersive’ exhibitions which feature gigantic digital projections of the Sistine Chapel, van Gogh’s canon, and Frida Kahlo’s oeuvre. We are now in a better position to understand the phenomenology of the aesthetic tourist’s motivations. Tourists think they owe it to themselves, by virtue of some facet of their practical identities, to see the Grand Canyon in real life (for example, qua nature enthusiast), to poke around the Louvre if they ever find themselves in Paris (for example, qua cultured person), and so on. Poseurs may make do with coffee table books, since they merely pretend to have some trait in order to impress others.30 But someone who genuinely conceives of themselves under the relevant identity will be motivated by that identity to seek out the ‘authentic’ aesthetic experience, which they believe can only be afforded by first-hand engagement with the aesthetic object. But why? A promising explanation comes from the distinction between epistemic and provenential instances.31 A provenential instance (P-instance) of an artwork is just the logically (though not necessarily temporally) first full instantiation of the artwork that stands in the right kind of causal-intentional relation to the artist’s act of creation and possesses all of the right kinds of manifest properties that bear experientially upon appreciation of the work.32 Artworks can be either (1) P-singular, which is to say that they are of a kind properly instantiated only once, such as most paintings, or (2) P-multiple, as is usually the case with multiple artworks (for example, literature or the performing arts). An epistemic instance (E-instance) of a work, by contrast, is an instance that fully qualifies to play the same kind of experiential role as the perception of the original does.33 In other words, E-instances possess all of the manifest properties required to properly appreciate the work in question. Works that are P-multiple are necessarily E-multiple; P-singular works, however, can be either E-singular or E-multiple.34 Where singular artworks are concerned, we usually count the work’s P-instance as its only E-instance, and this explains why we think that we must travel to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa: photographs are not proper epistemic instances of the work, because they cannot adequately capture all of its relevant perceptual properties. Multiple artworks, however, tend to offer a wider selection of E-instances – for example, prints of a print or photograph, recordings of music, videotaped performances, and so on. 29 Charles Mudede, ‘Don’t Cry about the Cathedral in Paris: 3D Technology Can Give It a New and Even More Spiritual Future’, Slog: The Stranger’s Blog, 16 April 2019, https://www. thestranger.com/slog/2019/04/16/39927138/dont-cry-about-the-cathedral-in-paris-3dtechnology-can-give-it-a-new-and-even-more-spiritual-future. 30 Madeleine Ransom, ‘Frauds, Posers and Sheep: A Virtue Theoretic Solution to the Acquaintance Debate’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2019): 417–34. 31 See David Davies, ‘Multiple Instances and Multiple “Instances”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010): 411–26; ‘Enigmatic Variations’, Monist 95 (2012): 644–63; ‘What Type of “Type” Is a Film?’ in Art and Abstract Objects, ed. Christy Mag Uidhir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 263–83. 32 Davies, ‘Multiple Instances’, 414–15. 33 Ibid., 415. Following Korsmeyer, an epistemic instance could similarly be characterized as possessing all of a work’s characteristic properties; see Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Aesthetic Deception: On Encounters with the Past’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008): 117–27; and ‘Real Old Things’, British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2016): 225. 34 Davies, ‘Multiple Instances’, 426. 191Xhignesse Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.343 Fyhri, Aslak, Jens Kristian Steen Jacobsen, and Hans Tømmervik. ‘Tourists’ Landscape Perceptions and Preferences in a Scandinavian Coastal Region.’ Landscape and Urban Planning 91 (2009): 202–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landurbplan.2009.01.002 Greenberg, Clement. ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch.’ In Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3–33. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. 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