The status of an art object with regard to its audience is perhaps the most important of all, at least that part of it which deals with the end user. There are many theories of value, of excellence, which insist on an absolute value, that is to say they assert the value to be inherent in the work, and independent of any person's experience of that work. Such accounts only have been dreamed up by artists themselves, since they alone are likely to mistake the flush of satisfaction following a successful creation for evidence of a value independent of a perceiver. It seems to me that all absolute theories of this kind spring from this error, for it is an error. The affective theories, on the other hand, are generated by readers and connoisseurs. In one important respect they are superior to absolute theories, namely they encompass them. An absolute theory is unable to make a place for an affective theory, but an absolute theory may be readily explained in terms of an affective account, and since the affective account is consistent with the rest of our natural science, it shows that the absolute account is suspect, except as an honest but mistaken affective report.