“把你的生活当做一件艺术品来过!”Thus rings the slogan discussed by John, Ken, and Lanier Anderson on the August 8, 2013,episodeof中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播，在斯坦福现场录制。该节目于6月5日重播。再听的时候，我突然想到一个大问题。

“生活即艺术作品”的理念，正如它在节目中阐述的那样，体现了一种对艺术创作是什么样子的不切实际的个人主义描绘，这破坏了这个隐喻。It seems to say:Ishould makemylife a work of art. And presumably each other person is responsible for making her or his life its own work of art.

But this way of thinking about art doesn’t capture the collaborative nature of art-making.

No artwork is made entirely by one individual. Even so-called “one-man shows” have producers, lighting designers, ushers, box offices, theatre janitors, creative consultants, set designers, and stagehands. Novels have editors, copy editors, writers’ groups, creative writing programs, cover designers, printers, and paper makers. And even paintings require canvass makers, people who collect materials for pigments, brush makers, and frame makers.

So the existence of art at all depends onmany人们，大多数人的生活不会创造出有趣的艺术作品。例如，一个舞台管理人员，大部分的夜晚都是在后台的一个部分到另一个部分，把各种道具放在适当的位置。The individualistic image embodied in the existing life-as-art idea ignores the crucial fact thatreal艺术有舞台管理人员和许多其他类型的普通贡献者。为了创造一件艺术作品，你需要很多人。

这是否意味着我们应该抛弃把生活变成一件艺术作品的隐喻性想法?它不是。此外，如果我们试图发展这个隐喻的想法以一种更现实的方式呈现艺术创作过程的协作本质，我认为我们也会得到一个版本，作为生活指南的艺术创作与作为生活指南的道德更好地一致。

Consider this: stagehands are, in a way, the most moral people in all of theatre. They give and seldom receive deserved credit, but they do it anyway, because the show must go on. So it seems to me that a life-as-art metaphor that makes room for collaborative players like stagehands is likely to sit well with moral demands in life, as opposed to being in competition with those demands.

So here’s the new metaphor. Instead of me thinking ofmyindividual life as a work of art, I should rather think ofhuman historyas a work of art, where my role is to make a contribution that helps make that history beautiful. The artwork is not justme. It’sall of us, a bunch of creatures on the stage of an antecedently existing world…or a bunch of creatures working together to make a beautiful painting…or a bunch of creatures working together to weave a beautiful tapestry…

This way of thinking captures the idea that aesthetic values can guide life choices. But it avoids the narcissism of the life-as-art idea as it comes down to us from Nietzsche. Furthermore, it makes sense of how one can have a good life even if one’sindividuallife is not dramatic or artistically potent. One might be a little-noticed stagehand in the grand drama of human history, moving one’s assigned props in dutiful fashion. Still, if one does one’s part in making beauty, one has lived a good life. Or one might be a mere pigment maker in the process of painting human history, and still one can have had a beautiful life. And so on.

This way of thinking, finally, should take away a lot of unneeded pressure that seemed to me to exist in the earlier, individualistic version of the metaphor. How many of us have individual lives that would be worth writing up in the form of a Homeric epic? Not many! Should we then see our lives as failures, as not having succeeded? Certainly not. In theatre, everyone who does their job well makes the show a little or a lot better—more beautiful. If the artwork of life is the human drama as a whole, the same can be said for any life that contributes well to that drama: it was a good life.