Graw’s slim new volume argues that artworks, unlike other commodities, have a “special value form” that puts the labor that has gone into their production on display, including immaterial labor like communication, ideation, and conceptualization (what she terms art’s “intellectual surplus value”). Graw seems to want to say that it’s both at once: “Artworks trigger this vitalist notion,” she writes, “not only by giving it a material vehicle, but also by intervening concretely in their respective social contexts in a specific way. . . The special value form of an artwork is not only founded on the specificity of artistic labor; it is also dependent on its reception.”