 A Kant-inspired view of long standing is that aesthetics is concerned not with how things are but with how they appear (e.g., Urmson 1957), a view sometimes called aesthetic empiricism (Currie 1989) On this view aesthetics takes no cognisance of authenticity, which depends on history and not on appearance; a fake Vermeer does not become authentic by being visually indistinguishable from a genuine one. Is an object’s history really aesthetically irrelevant? Those with an interest in art, craft and the design of artefacts generally are much concerned with the object’s history, and there are arguments to support the view that the application of at least some aesthetic properties depends on assumptions about that history. Consider two such attributions from Sibley’s (1959) extensive list of aesthetic properties: being delicate and being dynamic. A line that is seen as delicate when thought to be drawn by hand may not seem so when revealed as the product of a machine, and Walton (1970) argued that, of two works which are visually indistinguishable, one may be fairly described as dynamic and the other not, depending on differences in their category membership (for defences of aesthetic empiricism concerning visual art see Zanwill and, on music, Dodd; for the aesthetic relevance of genuineness or authenticity see Korsmeyer 2019). The suggestion of at least the first of these examples (being delicate) is that the aesthetic properties of a thing, and the aesthetic values that possession of these properties entails, depend on the kind of achievement that the fashioning of the work represents. What may be a considerable achievement for one person at one time may be a greater, lesser or at least a different achievement for someone else, working with different materials or in a distinct artistic culture (Dutton 1979; Currie 1989; Huddleston 2012; Levinson 2016); James Grant (2020) suggests that we do better to think in terms of a work’s capacity to exhibit the skills of its maker rathen than in terms of its constituting an achievement of the maker (see also Currie 2018).