 This claim about the ontological status of works of art means that a spectator ‘of’ a work of art—a sonata, a poem, a painting—is actually creating the work of art in his mind. Croce’s main argument for this is the same as, therefore no better but no worse than, Russell’s argument from the relativity of perception to sense-data. The perceived aesthetic qualities of anything vary with the states of the perceiver; therefore in speaking of the former we are really speaking of the latter (Aes. 106; Croce does not, it seems, consider the possibility that certain states of the perceiver might be privileged, but it is evident that he would discount this possibility). Now the Crocean formulation—to intuit is to express—perhaps begins to make sense. For ‘intuition’ is in some sense a mental act, along with its near-cognates ‘representation’, ‘imagination’, ‘invention’,‘vision’, and ‘contemplation.’ Being a mental act, something we do, it is not a mere external object.