Artworks as abstract objects

It seems that artworks of some art forms admit of multiple instances while artworks of others do not. It is generally accepted that there are numerous instances of a work of literature to be found in the world but only one instance of any given painting. I will argue that all art forms admit of multiple instances by defending Gregory Currie's (1989) Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis. While Currie derives it from his Action Type Hypothesis, I will defend it on independent grounds. Given this, I will argue that all artworks are abstract objects, specifically I will argue for the Fusion-Structure Type Theory. I will also examine a recent debate in the literature between Julian Dodd and Ben Caplan and Carl Matheson about the creatability of abstract objects. Caplan and Matheson also raise the problem of persistence for artworks as abstract objects. If an artwork cannot persist, then we have no reason to believe that artworks that were created hundreds of years ago continue to exist now. Since we do think that a great number of those artworks exist now, we cannot accept a theory of artworks as abstract objects that does not allow artworks to persist.