Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The programs were attacked from two directions (though mostly by the same people): that they produced bad art and that they funded Communists. The former charge was almost by design impossible to counter—it has been dragged out over and over again in the years following the Depression to decry government spending on the arts, with those who make this claim cherry-picking mediocre or offensive pieces in order to denounce any investment at all. The project almost certainly funded plenty of art that any number of people might consider “bad,” and yet the production of bad art is on some level necessary if a society values art at all. The latter claim might have been true on some level—certainly the Communist Party’s agitation had helped bring about the arts project, and the Soviet Union certainly subsidized artists and their training and production. But for the New Dealers who backed and supported the project, the aim was the maintenance and expansion of an American art. When World War II began, the artists were conscripted like anyone else into the war effort, becoming employees of the WPA War Services Subdivision, where they produced posters and works that aestheticized the war. With the war’s end, American artists became a symbol of the ability of capitalism (glossed as “freedom”) to produce great works. New York benefited from the destruction of European creative centers, becoming the world’s art capital.19

  The image of the lone artist, the uniquely brilliant individual differentiating himself from the crowd, served American Cold War interests. Jackson Pollock was the ideal American artist of the postwar period, splattering his id onto the canvas, incomprehensible to all but those smart enough to understand his special genius. Pollock’s abstract works were contrasted with Soviet realism and held up as the epitome of freedom; state-subsidized art, even though it had helped make Pollock’s career possible, was criticized as too limiting, too strict to produce great works.20

  Artists continued to rely on a variety of direct and indirect subsidies in order to produce, though. The postwar welfare state in Europe, in particular, brought decent living conditions, the dole, and state-funded arts education that still produce artists like Kate O’Shea, even in their currently pared-back state. And art continued to present a more attractive working option than fitting oneself into the postwar work routine, whether it be the factory or the proverbial gray flannel suit. The 1960s brought the beginnings of what French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello called the “artistic critique” of capitalism: that it was capitalist work discipline, not the collectivism of the Soviet Union, that produced endless dull drudgery and conformity. Workers began to demand more from life than a nine-to-five job.21

  In this moment of upheaval, artists once again turned to organizing as workers. In late 1960s New York, rebellion was everywhere, and the New Left’s critique of capitalism left space for artists to imagine themselves as workers whose labor was also significant—and potentially dangerous—to capitalism. In trying to find the levers they could push to dissociate from and destroy the system, a number of famed artists came together as the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). They challenged the idea of art as commodity, organized to make demands on museums and other art institutions, and produced defiantly political works and minimalist creations fabricated by hired workers. They fought and challenged each other and ultimately the AWC fell apart, shattered in part by issues of sexism and racism.22

  The artists of the Coalition did not all agree on what it meant, even, to be an art worker. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson noted that some “asserted that their practices were governed by the power differentials (and exploitation) inherent to the rules of employment within the capitalist West. For others, the recognition that art was work… was a move of empowerment rather than degradation; work signified serious, valuable effort.” They argued, too, over their target. Unlike the Artists’ Union of the New Deal era or the state-funded artists of socialist and social-democratic countries (Dutch and Danish artists, for example, had unions), New York artists lacked a central employer. This, though, did not mean that their art was not work, or that they lacked common antagonists: they wound up, many times, targeting museums. They demanded representation for Black and Latinx artists; challenged museums to pay artists and speculated on possible wage systems; and claimed rights over how their art was displayed, even after it had been purchased. In all these ways they challenged their alienation as workers. They also demanded “free days” at museums so that a broader public could see their work—perhaps their most successful legacy.23

  The Coalition also left behind the seeds of a unionization movement among museum staffers, one that has reappeared in recent years alongside other rebellions from laborers of love. Some AWC members had been museum staffers before their art careers stabilized; the Coalition argued that curation and other support roles were also important art work, and so supported the move in 1971 by the staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, perhaps the AWC’s readiest target) to form the Professional and Administrative Staff Association, the first union of art museum workers in the country. The museum did not concede easily to the union, and the workers struck for two weeks that year to preserve their win.24

  As the Art Workers were rebelling, though, the modern art world was coming into its own. Artists enjoyed new levels of prestige (which the AWC used to gain attention for its actions and demands). The National Endowment for the Arts was formed and made grants to artists, including members of the Coalition. While nothing like the levels of state funding outside of the United States, the grants were still a source of income for many artists. But although there was something of an art boom, a 1970 report noted that still, only one in ten painters or sculptors actually supported themselves with their art work. “Almost nobody could pay rent from art,” Lucy Lippard of the AWC said. A few stars became famous and sold works for fabulous sums; the rest of the field looked on longingly from their part-time jobs and crumbling apartments. Art stars became mini-industries in themselves, hiring workers themselves in order to produce works of art. How could such artists be in solidarity with the working class?25

  At the same time that the AWC was raising hell in New York, Italian artists were inspired by radical movements of the time, operaismo (workerism) and autonomia, which understood the fight against capitalism as extending outside of the workplace and into all facets of society, the “social factory.” While the Wages for Housework movement used this understanding to formulate its demands around women’s unpaid work in the home, artists aligned with the movements rejected art institutions and instead made art in public that aimed to disrupt business as usual. While factory workers revolted, artists looked for ways to participate in what seemed at the time to be a revolutionary moment.26

  But the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s never quite coalesced, though radical artists like Kate O’Shea have never stopped trying to find ways to make art outside of the market. State officials and capital recognized the potential of artists and the artistic critique, allied with worker rebellions, to disturb the consensus that allowed capitalism to proceed uninterrupted, and under neoliberalism we see where this has ended: fetishizing the individual artist while cutting off all the legs of the state supports (or even the benign neglect) that had made her possible in the first place. The welfare state and publicly funded arts education were stripped away, housing costs were jacked up in the cities once celebrated for their arts culture, and that art culture itself turned into a tourist commodity. Tourists flock to Broadway to see the 839,258,256th replaying of Cats or the latest Harry Potter spinoff, while experimental theater dies. They go to the art museum to gawk at the famous paintings, while avoiding the outer boroughs where the working artists have been pushed.

  The artist then became the ideal worker for the neoliberal age just as neoliberalism made it harder and harder to succeed as an artist. Today’s worker must be “a creative figure, a person of intuition, invention, contacts, chance encounters, someone who is always on the move, passing from one project to the next, one world to another,” in Boltanski and Chiapello’s wor
ds, in order to succeed. Stability, never a hallmark of the artist’s condition, disintegrated under the guise of improving work, of concession to the artistic critique. Work would be exciting, fulfilling, creative, a place for self-expression, but you had to give up knowing where your next check was coming from. If the work itself is its own reward, it is much easier for the boss to tell workers to shut up and look grateful.27

  Into the crueler world of neoliberalism crashed the AIDS crisis, devastating New York’s arts community in the 1980s. The activist group ACT UP had an artists’ wing, Gran Fury, that produced propaganda for wildly dramatic direct actions, and artists affected by the virus, who lost friends and lovers or were dying themselves, produced haunting artworks forcing their audience to confront the realities of the disease. They challenged the brutal conservative regimes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to see their suffering. And yet conservatives tended to use the works of gay artists as reasons to attack what little arts funding there was. Art in these cases was political work, as it had been in the 1930s and the 1960s, but now it was drained of hope and laden with grim determination.28

  Even as the AIDS crisis laid bare the realities of a political-economic system uninterested in the realities of artists’ lives, the neoliberal era, with its stripped-down public services and go-go markets, was creating new levels of art star and new arguments to justify its own existence. The term “creative class” entered our vocabulary as an argument, as filmmaker and author Astra Taylor wrote, “that individual ingenuity can fill the void left by declining institutions.” Capitalism has taken the members of the so-called creative class, in the terms of its most famous advocate, Richard Florida, from outsider status, as “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe,” and placed them “at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.” In Florida’s framework, the Protestant work ethic has now fused with the “bohemian ethic,” and the bohemians suddenly had the power; it was no longer necessary for workers to struggle over control of the means of production, because those means were all in their heads anyway. It’s another gloss on the artistic critique, synthesized into the revitalized, sprawling capitalism of the 1990s and 2000s. Who needs public funding when creativity is an engine of economic growth itself?29

  THE ART MARKET OF THE NEOLIBERAL AGE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN designed purely in opposition to the demands of radical art workers of the past century. Art buyers hold art because of its value; its uniqueness points to their own brilliance as consumers, and acquiring it is a way for them to acquire some of the sheen of the artist on themselves. Art is perhaps the ultimate fetishized commodity, where the work that went into creating it is almost entirely mystified, forgotten, wiped away. It appeared as if by magic, as if buyers conjured it with their dollars, blessed by the sanctification of an art world that makes it clear that it is art, and art worth owning. The existence of the artist is only there as justification—this famed artist made this, therefore it is art.

  Attempts to peer into the art-production process were hard to find as I worked on this book; coming up dry on this research again and again convinced me that I was heading in the right direction. The process of making art is too rarely studied and described as work. But sociologist Howard Becker, in his classic Art Worlds, did dig into the process of creating art: not just the inspiration of the lone artist but the supporting cast that makes it possible.30

  An art world, in Becker’s term, is not singular but rather “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works the art world is noted for.” Art worlds are made up of the various workers who do the funding, producing, distributing, displaying, criticizing, observing, and, yes, purchasing of art as well as educating artists. The size of these supporting casts varies, but art production and circulation nevertheless depend on a broad network of workers even as those workers’ participation is mystified.31

  Conceptual artist Kerry Guinan drew attention to the breadth of art worlds with an exhibition that included a collaboration with factory workers in the Dominican Republic, who manufactured the canvases commonly bought at art stores in Ireland, where she lived. “The factory workers each signed a blank canvas and shipped it over to Ireland and I exhibited them,” she explained. “This work was questioning the labor that is behind everything that we produce, even dematerialized conceptual art like the type that I do.” For Guinan, her work “is always revealing power relations in a very experiential way to myself and to everyone involved in it.”32

  Art worlds are always stretching, bending, changing, and even dying. Would-be artists compete for the privilege to be considered such; there is often an oversupply of workers for the art work considered creative. The creative work, after all, is the part worth loving, and the part that grants special status. To be eligible for inclusion in the systems that ensure an artist can pay the bills—can be represented by a gallery, apply for public or foundation grants, get hired for commissions, sell their works or reproductions thereof—one must be granted the status of artist in the first place, a status conferred by institutions, from art schools to galleries to museums. Even now, few artists make their living solely by producing works of art; indeed, many of them pay the bills working in different parts of the art world, like the museum workers who were themselves artists, or art teachers producing works on the side.33

  In an uncertain system, where artists must please someone in order to get their work funded (either up front, with a grant, or on the back end by selling the product), there will be limits on what they can do, on how radical a message they can send. In this sense, though independent artists are freer than wage laborers, they are still embedded in a system of power hierarchies structured by capitalism. They may not have a boss, but, unless they are wealthy themselves, they nonetheless have to appeal to others to support their work. Ben Davis argued that artists are quintessentially middle class, having some power and autonomy at work, and some status, but not freed from the pressures of working for a living. And like others in the middle class, they have been sold the idea that not having a boss is liberation. This position, as the workers of the Art Workers’ Coalition discovered, limits artists’ ability to organize for better conditions. Upon whom are their demands to be made?34

  It is not surprising that artists are often loath to think of themselves as workers. Work, after all, sucks. Yet this vision of art work as somehow outside of the economy means that we know very little about the working conditions of actually-existing artists. Are they broke, are they struggling, how do they pay the bills, what do they contribute to the economy, could the state do more to help? Surveys have been done by activist organizations like Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), which released a 2012 study of around one thousand New York artists, which found that the majority did not receive any compensation for their participation in shows in museums or nonprofits. A 2014 UK survey found that “71% of artists had received no fee at all for exhibiting in arts council–funded galleries, and 63% had been forced to turn down exhibitions because they could not afford to carry the costs themselves.” In 2018, US researchers found that the median income of the artists they surveyed was between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, with 21 percent pulling in $10,000 or less. Meanwhile, the audience for museums and galleries is (perhaps unsurprisingly) older, whiter, and richer than the rest of the population, on average, and that audience is shrinking. At the same time, the art market—with time out for a dip around the global financial crisis—is bigger than ever, generating well over $700 billion a year.35

  State support for the arts varies in the industrialized West, from the tiny trickle of funds disbursed in the United States to more robust programs across Europe, with the amounts spent, unsurprisingly, higher in social democratic countries where the public sector as a whole is larger. In 2010, Ivo Josipović, a composer who was then president of Croatia, argued, “When regulating the position of artists in
the society, one shouldn’t have Mozart, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Balzac or some other genius in mind, but a human that chooses art as his profession because he has his internal motives to be a genius. The system should give opportunity to an artist to be independent, to express his talent in the way he finds the best, and in the same time secure a decent life for him and his family.” In Denmark and some other countries, there are trade unions for artists; in these places they are more likely to receive state funding and therefore to have a target for their organizing efforts. Mexican artists are able to pay taxes with art work; the government displays the work in offices or public museums.36

  But working-class people remain underrepresented in the arts. One US survey from 2014 found that artists and other “creative workers” were more likely to come from middle-income homes even as they make something like 35 percent less than their comfortable parents did. A 2018 UK study noted that in addition to the very real barriers of money, artists also face a series of gatekeepers who remain attached to the idea of art as a meritocracy—gatekeepers who tend to come from more comfortable backgrounds themselves, making it easier for them to wave away the difficulties that artists of color with less (or no) family support face just getting to enter that meritocratic contest.37

  In all of this inequality reigns; in fact, it grows. A handful of superstars’ success does not, in fact, trickle down; more art school graduates are pumped out each year than will ever make a living making art. Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl noted that the perception of the art world is that it is sponsored by the wealthy, but that in fact, “throughout history it has been artists and artworkers, more than any other actors, who have subsidized art production.” It is the artists, still, who have made art valuable, and so often that is because they have done their work out of love, and in fact have done plenty of other work in order to be able to support their art. Sociologist Andrew Ross called this “sacrificial labor,” a way that one gives up certain facets of stability in order to pursue work that is seen as meaningful—more meaningful, perhaps, even than personal relationships. (This notion echoes, of course, the conditions of the nonprofit worker.) Artists, after all, must love their work above all other things. One particularly ludicrous 2018 study used medical imaging technology, scanning the brains of self-identified “creatives,” in an attempt to prove that sacrifice was simply hardwired into artists’ brains.38