The argument of this book does not, however, concern only the effects that transformations of labor process or occupational structure have on the plane of aesthetic production; I also argue for the reciprocal effects that aesthetic concepts and vocabularies have exerted on the restructuring of labor. These reciprocal effects are, by definition, operative only during a historically limited period, since the refashioning of labor in the image of art derived its condition of possibility from an anterior opposition of the two terms, where art was everything that waged or salaried labor was not: free, self-directed, creative, generative, mutable, satisfying. The formation of art and the aesthetic more broadly as an object of inquiry emerges, as many have acknowledged, alongside the development of capitalist industry, and the robust aesthetic philosophies of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period presuppose the separation between fine and servile arts, between art proper and artisanal craft, between the free and unfree, the disinterested and the mercenary. As we all know, these divisions were never more than partial; art has always been attached by an umbilical cord of gold to the masters of the capitalist mode of production. However, the aestheticization of labor under discussion here is of a particular order. A reader might note, for instance, that novels and paintings and poems have been produced in exchange for money throughout capitalism (and before it as well), but this is something different from the recasting of the labor process and the ethics of labor according to aesthetic values and ideas. It is, rather, what we might call the “commercialization” of art. Other readers might point to the professionalization and institutionalization of artistic labor and art in general, but yet again this is something else, even when we are talking about the thoroughgoing industrialization of art that one notices in the music and film industries (the culture industries); the remaking of art enterprises along the lines of capitalist lines of production, something that meets serious economic obstacles in most cases, is not the same as the remaking of capitalist lines of production in the image of art enterprises. Nor does the absorption of particular contents from the visual arts and poetry in the advertising industry, to give one example, really provide much of an exception to my argument. Though admittedly some artistic values, ideologies, and vocabularies passed into the labor process of advertisers prior to World War II, this was a more or less limited development and led to no overall refashioning of managerial ideology. The merger of art and labor described in this book is transitional by definition and probably irreversible. Aesthetic values in the workplace no longer hold the charm they once did and are unlikely to regain their luster anytime soon, even as much as new slogans and watchwords such as “do what you love” appear everyday. Just as the aesthetic critique has been neutralized and naturalized, so too has the recuperation of that critique via the refashioning of labor in aesthetic terms.