 Beardsley never explicitly responded to this objection, but he wouldn’t be fazed. The objection assumes that if an object is displayed in a museum—a fine arts museum, not a history museum or any other sort of museum—or if an art historian or art critic discusses an object, then it must be a work of art, or at least that there’s very strong reason to think that it’s a work of art. That it’s some reason to think so Beardsley wouldn’t deny; but that it’s necessarily a strong or definitive reason he certainly would. Fine arts museums sometimes display the working clothes or palettes of artists, but they aren’t works of art. This has to do with the fact that even if the primary business of a museum is to display art, it has other functions as well, and justifiably extends its mission in various ways. Palettes and working clothes are an extension in one direction, for one reason, but pieces of driftwood and stones are a different extension, in a different direction, and for a different reason. They’re displayed—in small numbers—because they’re aesthetically interesting, just as most works of art are. And Duchamp’s Fountain might be displayed not because it’s a work of art—although presenting an upside down urinal to a museum might be regarded as a small joke, and thus a minor work of art—but because (a) art, as a human endeavor, has a history, (b) museums, as a social institution, have a duty to acknowledge and exhibit that history, and (c) Fountain, as a well-chosen memorial to the joke, has a place in that history. Much the same can be said about the remarks of art critics and art historians respecting Fountain and its many kin. If such objects are called “works of art” for a long enough period of time, by a large enough group of people, the term can easily acquire a secondary sense or a number of derivative senses. Beardsley is probably alluding to as much in his remarks about the use of the term by or about the avant-garde. But that the appearance of coatracks, old shoes, broken sticks, and such like in museums, or that mention of them in books and journals by art critics and historians means that “art” in the primary sense is wrongly defined in terms of artifactuality and aesthetic intention—that hasn’t been shown, he would say. A perfectly good explanation of such phenomena can be provided in accord with a relatively traditional definition of art.