A new literary genre that I call the artist text has emerged on the cultural landscape. Specific to contemporary art, it adapts the strategies used by institutions to historicize artworks. Rather than take up the materiality of language as did writing by earlier conceptual artists, the artist text follows a backwards route into the status of art by adapting genealogical method and disallowing the objective distance necessary for historicization. The four artists that epitomize this genre are Seth Price, Bernadette Corporation, Tan Lin, and Sturtevant. Each chapter is an analysis of texts by these artists. The artist text illustrates that artists are not only interested in producing art for distribution within institutions and markets, but also in actively intervening in—and even controlling—their audience’s engagement with art history.