 Beardsley will have none of this. What it is to act on behalf of an institution is clear enough when an identifiable social institution, such as a university, is in question. The president of Marquette University, for example, declares a tuition hike, or signs a document granting tenure to David Decker. He acts on behalf of the institution in doing so, because there are clearly defined rules, roles, rights, responsibilities, powers, positions, concepts, and acts that constitute the institution that is the university, and he fits into it in a way that enables him to raise tuition, or to confer the status of tenured professor. There’s nothing remotely comparable in “the artworld”—no formal, identifiable set of interlocking rules, roles, relations, and so on constituting an institution, and so nothing like an institutional token (comparable to Marquette University or the Department of the Treasury) with empowered individuals capable of conferring the status of painting, literature, or music on objects. What there are are loose collections of people of various sorts interested in painting, music, and literature. The same is true of gardening and cooking, however, and roses and veal cutlets need no social institutions, no “gardenworlds” or “foodworlds”, to be what they are. Neither, Beardsley thinks, do paintings, poems, or concertos need social institutions, subdivisions of the “artworld”, to be what they are. Museums, books of poetry, academies of music, and journals of art criticism exist because of a felt need to accommodate, promote, explore, and otherwise reap the benefits of pre-existing, logically prior objects known as works of art. And as for practices,