 The equation also defeats the purpose of art criticism or interpretation, and indeed of the very notion of an aesthetic community, of an audience. To say that the work of art is identical with the intuition is to say that it is necessarily private. It is to say, for example, that since one man’s intuition of Botticelli’s Venus is necessarily different from any one else’s, there is no such thing as Botticelli’s Venus, understood not as a material painting but as a work of art; there is only Botticelli’s-Venus-for-A, Botticelli’s-Venus-for-B, and so on. But these intuitions cannot be compared, and there is no higher standard; thus they cannot be said to agree or disagree, since any such comparison would be logically impossible (see Tilghman 1971, Ch. 1, for further discussion; for at attempt at saving Croce, see Schusterman 1983). The position is perhaps not contradictory, but it is exceedingly unattractive; it renders art a diversion away from reality, when as Freud emphasized—to invoke a figure who is Croce’s opposite in almost every respect—the artist’s struggle with the medium is the attempt to conquer reality. Although Croce disowned this consequence, it’s hard not to conclude that on this view art is a domain of fancy (in the bad sense), without any check upon vanity (see Aes. 122 for a point at which Croce almost sees the point). If we bring back the material painted object into the picture, of course, then there is no such difficulty: ones ‘intuition’ will be accurate, or one’s interpretation will be correct, just in case it corresponds to the picture (of course the notion of ‘corresponds to the picture’ is only a placeholder for a great deal to be supplied by theories of representation, perspective, expression and other parts of aesthetics; but the one thing that plausible theories will share is a commitment to the object, the material painting).