 Collingwood’s theory is generally lumped together with that of Benedetto Croce as an expressive and idealist theory. There are of course differences, but the established picture is not inaccurate. And together with Croce’s theory, Collingwood’s has a fatal defect (without questioning the starting-point, that the essence of art to be expressive): In identifying the artwork with what we would normally think of as the experience of the artwork, he makes nonsense of the idea that the spectator interprets the artwork, and can do so more or less accurately; that different people can argue about the self-same work of art. It has become a truism that the artist is no better placed than the audience to interpret a work rightly, a truism that Collingwood, with his fulminations again aesthetic individualism, would agree. But then the various imaginative experiences have nothing to conform to, if artwork and experience and hence artwork and interpretation cannot be separated. That would be fatal to the theory; however, it is not clear that anything substantial would be lost, if Collingwood were simply to identify the work of art with the ‘bodily work’, thereby re-establishing room for interpretation to operate. This would seem to sit better with his idea that art is on a level with language, where language is a public phenomenon.