 What precisely is the motivation for this move, the conception of the work of art as imagined or ideal object? Leave aside the special cases of music and poetry, which Richard Wollheim notes have the special feature that they can be written down (see Wollheim 1972). Why not conceive painting, for example, as the creation of certain painted objects? This would be consistent with the thesis that painting is a not craft. The answer given by Collingwood is clear, but leads to trouble when we consider the question of interpretation. An experience of a painting involves a great deal that no one would say is ‘in the painting’, which is, after all, a nearly flat canvas with paint on it. Not only do we see things that are not really present, but for example we have impressions of space and mass, perhaps by means of what Berenson called ‘ideated sensations’—those which involve imaginary motor or kinaesthetic sensations. These phenomena are not literally features of the canvas, but they are in some sense features of the work. So Collingwood, in brief, includes within the work of art proper all that would normally be ascribed to the (correct) interpretation—the (correct) experience—of the artwork. But there is no reason to accept this, any more we should include all the relational facts—sowing, fertilization, watering and so on—that contribute to a growing plant to the plant itself. On contrary, the position makes it impossible for two spectators to disagree on the interpretation of a work. Irrespective of the concern with the privacy of the experience, if they attribute different properties to the object—that is, they find different properties in their respective total imaginative experiences—they are simply concerned with different objects, and their verdicts are compatible. We could set the artist’s own experience as a criterion of understanding the work, but that would make his death significant in way that we do not actually recognize, and would run against the grain of Collingwood’s antipathy to aesthetic individualism and the ‘cult of genius’, discussed below. As a matter of speculation, Collingwood perhaps thought that aesthetically relevant properties—expressive properties—have to be intrinsic properties of the work of art; in that case, perhaps his conclusion does follow. But it is much more satisfactory to hold that what we are arguing over when we disagree over the expressive properties of a work of art is the same object.