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Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.

they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.

To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.

What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details

Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).

too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.

In the New Millennium, the tradition that Judy Chicago pioneered of recognizing and celebrating women’s contributions continues in the vibrant new medium of the Web. Talan Memmott has suggested the term "Rich Lit" for the cornucopia of delights that this new "Dinner Party" offers.

The protest of the literati may be misguided, but it has enough nanograms of truth to prompt me to suggest a complementary term to Talan’s rich lit: open-work.

As a term, open-work calls attention to the fact that the craftwork of making has again become a recognized and important component of textual production. During the last several hundred years, the commodification of book production drove a wedge between authorial process and the hands-on labor of producing the book as a physical object. The complex history behind this separation has been documented by Mark Rose in Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, among others. Suffice it to say here that a constellation of economic, political and class forces was successful in promulgating the idea that what the author produced was an immaterial concept separated from and untainted by the commercial networks that brought the actual book into being.