Virtuosity and the virtuoso have together offered a longstanding analytic in studies of music and the performing arts broadly, wherein they have conventionally expressed an exemplary individual ability registered in performance. This model has found compelling philosophical and critical extension outside of these domains in accounts that link demands for flexible and creative work in the post-Fordist economy with virtuosic performance. Integrating these perspectives, this dissertation reappraises the concepts of virtuosity and the virtuoso to account for the ways that they are expressed, valorized, and reproduced within rapidly changing circuits of media, technology, labor, and social relations in the contemporary United States. I employ a Marxian critical framework to address how virtuosity uniquely encapsulates the ways that labor in the contemporary has taken on characteristics of performance; conversely, I examine how transformations in productive and reproductive labor alike work reflexively back on the categories of performance and social practice in the arts. In my analysis, virtuosity and the virtuoso unexpectedly emerge as objects in disparate social practices that I term reproductive economies of virtuosity. The first focuses on jazz “woodshedding” as a distinctively gendered, labor-mediated practice through which individual virtuosity emerges. Characterized by a reflexive domination of reproductive space, the woodshedder-virtuoso’s ability is indexed in a well-honed axe (instrument) and chops (technique) capable of surmounting the competitive socialities and market demands of public performance. The second traces the history of baby monitoring technologies and cognitive development tools and techniques as a homegrown practice of mediated listening aimed at the production of children as virtuosos. Culminating in the crises of social reproduction endemic to the contemporary, this history reveals the unexpectedly intimate relationship between biopolitics and virtuosity in technological transformations of domestic (private) space. The third investigates the networked milieus of social media as a locus of virtuosic performances of self-mediation in which the representation of publicity itself emerges as a structural element of virtuosic performance as social reproduction. This analysis locates virtuosity in longer metamorphoses of mediated publicity in which mobile sound technologies are of pivotal importance, and which have propelled the reproduction of new social forms under capitalism.