 Phenomenalism, even in linguistic dress, also conflicts with identifying aesthetic objects with productions, since in a great many cases the production of an aesthetic object isn’t the same thing as a presentation of it. But even if phenomenalism is put to the side and Beardsley is simply taken at his word, and aesthetic objects are identified with productions, there are still anomalies. The first and most important is that the ontological status of aesthetic objects would be variable to the point of being of little philosophical interest. A production of a novel, if read silently, is something mental, a series of thoughts, perhaps conjoined with images. The production of a play or symphony, however, isn’t mental at all, but a publicly accessible event or process. It thus has whatever ontological status events or processes do. In architecture, the production is a building (or a bridge or a walkway), and thus a physical object (or a cultural object, with physical properties, some would say). Such wide variability suggests that there’s no real ontology of art at all, nothing firm, finite, or systematically related enough among the arts to be worth taking note of. A second problem with taking aesthetic objects to be productions is that, since some aesthetic objects are mental objects, the problems with phenomenalism noted at the end of the last paragraph reemerge in at least some cases, literature among them. A third problem, one in effect already noted, is that even within one art aesthetic objects would have a shifting ontological status. In the case of poetry, for example, if a poem is read silently, the production, and thus the aesthetic object, is a mental thing, but if the same poem is read publicly, to an audience, the production, and thus the aesthetic object, is an event.