 Art proper is often bound up with magical ‘art’, and indeed it is common amongst critics to confuse them. Religious art—say a twelfth-century crucifix—may be aesthetically fine as well as induce a pious awe in the mind of the believer. But the fact that a suitably kitschy product may also serve the latter purpose shows that the magical effect can be aimed at independently from the aesthetic (admittedly, Collingwood underestimates the problem of disentangling these purportedly different responses—for some people, only an aesthetically fine thing can generate strong pious emotions; perhaps Collingwood can allow that some art proper may be instrumentally necessary for the achievement of magical ends). Frequently, the particular form of this mistake is to think that an attitude towards the subject-matter embodied in a work is rightly taken as the object of purely aesthetic criticism. Thus it is common to hear for example of a play praised for taking a salutary view of sexual politics and would therefore encourage the sexes to get on better; to say so is to say that the play is very good at what Collingwood is calling ‘magic’, but is neither here nor there as regards its status as art.