 The materialism is non-reductive in that works of art have properties that physical objects generally don’t. Such materialism works well with “singular” works of art, such as paintings, Beardsley thinks, but “multiple artworks”—musical compositions which have many performances, poems which exist in multiple printings—present problems. The musical composition isn’t any single score or performance, the poem any single printed text. For that reason, Beardsley once again is driven back in the direction of ontological pluralism: perhaps works of art are either physical objects (the singular works) or kinds of physical object (the multiple works), with “physical object” construed broadly here so as to include events (such as a dance). This position is only slightly more economical than Beardsley’s earlier one—no works of art are ideas, which is good, since taking works of art to be ideas doesn’t fit in well with a number of his critical postulates—and only slightly tidier—essentially, the proliferation of ontological categories is limited by the broad but abstract concept of a kind.