Walter - Would you like to have an apple, a pear, or an orange?
Carl - I would prefer having a chocolate cake!
Walter - You can have the chocolate cake, as well, but which fruit
would you prefer among apples, pears, and oranges?
Carl - An apple, please.
The fact the Carl prefers cakes over fruits does *not* mean that there
is *no* fruit which he prefers (over other fruits)...
Mmmmm You do know, of course, that the W in my sig stands for Walter? :-)Let's say it's Carl asking the question, this Walter's (true) answer, actually, would be "none, thanks, fruit makes me sick" :-)
So you are going from the specific (you have a favourite fruit) to the general (everyone has a favourite fruit), and getting it wrong. Sorry.
That was the point further back about a program having multiple authors yet still being a coherent work. You can't necessarily do that with art.I am not convinced that you cannot do that with art. There are many examples of works of art with multiple authors. The Iliad and the Odyssey come to mind, for instance (as you probably know, many modern scholars believe that Homer never existed as a single historical poet: poems attributed to him are believed to be the result of the assembling and successive modifying of several stories that were at first transmitted orally).
Thing is, we know these are works with multiple authors. And we can tell when works of art have a single author. That's why I get rather annoyed when people want me to write something for them, and then start hacking it about - I don't care whether they write it, or I write it, I object to the mess that results when we both write it.
Anyway, I don't think this point is relevant for our discussion.
How do you define "work"? :-) That was Ben's point in response to my post, and I think it's relevant here. I'll address his point here, but he chooses a recording for his example. Let's say I write and recite a poem. Is the work the poem, or the recording? If I say "it's the poem", then the recording contains the source. And if you say "the work is the recording" and modify it, then as far as I'm concerned you've destroyed the work, it is no longer a coherent whole. Why should I help you?
My wife's just interrupted me, and I think she's accidentally given me the "correct" answer. "There is no such thing as 'source' for an artistic work". Programming is maths, and as such there is a direct correlation between the version we can understand, and the version the computer can understand - they are "equivalent but different". There's no such similarity for art. :-)
Cheers, Wol -- Anthony W. Youngman - anthony@thewolery.demon.co.uk