It’s hard to believe July is almost over! A couple of weeks ago I was in Santa Fe for the Rocky Mountain ASA. It was my first aesthetics conference ever. That felt a bit awkward since I’ve been actively doing philosophy of art for more than fifteen years, but everyone was super-welcoming. It was a great conference.
Today I was editing the remarks I delivered there and ended up cutting several paragraphs. I took them out because they don’t need to be in the paper, but I think they’re correct nevertheless. So here they are…
Before moving on, I want to address one possible point of misunderstanding. Appreciating a version on its own is something we can do with any musical version, so it does not depend on the version’s being a cover. So one might label the first mode as appreciation qua cover and the second mode as appreciation qua version. As a matter of labels, I have no objection to this.
Yet it invites the mistake of concluding that only the first mode (considering the cover in relation to the original) is really appreciating the cover. I want to insist that there are not two separate objects, the cover and the version. Rather, there is just the cover version. And we appreciate that same work whether we have the original in view or not. So both are modes of appreciating the cover.
Suppose you hear a recorded cover like Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” and do not know initially that it is a cover. If you learn that it is, listen to the Arrows’ original, and return to relisten to Joan Jett’s version, then you are still evaluating the same work as you were before. You are just evaluating it in a different way.