During the late 1980s, the near-worship of artistic genius produced auction sales of works by Vmcent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso for tens of millions of dollars, over $15 million for a painting by Jasper Johns, and record prices for works by many other deceased and even living masters. At the same time, it was no longer controversial in academic and intellectual circles to maintain that art works are the products of what Howard Becker has termed collective activity carried out within loosely defined art worlds: Works of art, from this point of view, are not the products of individual makers, "artists" who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into existence. Artists are some sub-group of the world's participants who, by common agreement, possess a specialgift, therefore make a unique and indispensable contribution to the work, and thereby make it art. (1982: 35) The concept of the art world-with its central focus on the collective, social, and conventional nature of artistic production, distribution, and appreciation--confronts and potentially undermines the romantic ideology of art and artists still dominant in Western societies.

ラリー・グロスが著した本書は、私たちが盲信しがちな「孤高の天才」という幻想を鮮やかに解体してみせます。一世を風靡した高額オークションの裏側で、芸術を個人の天賦の才ではなく、社会的な「共同作業」の産物として捉え直す視座は極めて挑発的です。ロマン主義的な神話を剥ぎ取り、慣習や制度の中で編み上げられる芸術の正体を暴くその筆致には、知的なスリルが満ち溢れています。 作品を単なる個人の表現ではなく、広大なエコシステムの結実として読み解くアプローチは、私たちが「美」を見る際の解像度を劇的に高めてくれるでしょう。芸術の真の所有者は誰かという根源的な問いを突きつけ、表現の本質を再定義する本作は、現代を生きる全ての表現者と享受者に贈るべき情熱的なマニフェストです。