 If taken ontologically, on the other hand, the force of the claim is that a work of art isn’t a physical object but a different kind of object altogether, an object whose nature and existence are in part constituted by culture, tradition, or social institutions. Arthur Danto’s distinction between artworks and “mere real things”(1981, 1), with beds and ties being paradigms of mere real things, suggests just such an ontological distinction. For Danto, it’s (1) theories of art and (2) the “aboutness” of art, or the fact that art is necessarily subject to interpretation, that make mere real things transform, so to speak, into artworks, and gain a new ontological status. The nature of a theory of art is never spelled out by Danto, but apparently all such theories require an object to be properly placed in an “artworld” to be a work of art, and not just anyone, at any time, can do such placing. But even if the indefinite and unexplained nature of Danto’s key concepts is put aside, and the fact that many works of art (for example, a typical concerto) don’t seem to be about anything at all, or subject to interpretation in any significant sense (at least until something for it to be about or interpreted in terms of is cooked up, such as that it’s about the very notes being played, or that it comments on the history of concertos)—even if that’s also put aside, it’s hard to see how (1) and (2) can effect ontological transformations, how things which are otherwise physical objects become, ontologically speaking, different objects. Rather, Beardsley thinks, what (1) and (2) suggest is that if a physical object is a work of art, it has, or at least can have, properties it wouldn’t otherwise have. If a person’s a policeman, he has properties—being able to arrest people, for example—that he wouldn’t otherwise have, but a policeman has whatever ontological status a person has, no more and no less. Receiving a certificate from the police academy and putting on a badge may “transform” a man, but a new object, an essentially institutional or cultural object, a policeman, doesn’t enter the world because of such doings. The argument that works of art are cultural objects, not physical objects, because the former have properties the latter don’t, is thus rejected by Beardsley.