 One family of views on the ontological status of works of art finds its orientation in a longstanding conception of the arts in general. The word ‘art’ derives from the Latin ’ars’, which is often taken as translating the Greek term ‘technē’, which covered various sorts of practical capacities or powers. The word derived from the Indo-European root ‘tek’, meaning to put together the woodwork of a house; a ‘tekton’ was a carpenter (Angier 2010, 1). Carpentry is something that cannot be done without some skill, and to become good at the art of carpentry requires training and practice. To exercise an art or craft is to activate a power to bring things about that otherwise would not have happened. In this vein Aristotle declares in his Metaphysics that “all arts, i.e. all productive forms of knowledge are potentialities; they are principles of change in another thing or in the artist himself considered as other” (Met. 1046a36–1046b4). In Nicomachean Ethics he remarks that “since building is an art and is essentially a reasoned state of capacity to make, and there is neither any art that is not such a state nor such a state that is not an art), art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning” (Nic. Eth., 1140a6–1140a11).