  One prevalent response to the question of art’s existence is a straightforward realism to the effect that works of art figure amongst those entities that, once they have been brought into existence, do not depend on anyone’s (actual or possible) beliefs or responses. Assuming that something can only be discovered if it already exists, a striking example of a realist statement is Samuel Alexander’s claim that “Shakespeare discovered Hamlet in the English language the way the sculptor discovers his figure in the block” (1925, 28). A more prominent example of a philosopher who defends realism about works of art is Monroe C. Beardsley (1958), who seems to have espoused the disjunctive thesis that a work of art is either a particular physical object or a kind of physical object (see the entry on Beardsley’s aesthetics). Various other options for realism about artworks will be mentioned below.