Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  Hardwired or not, in order to continue this cycle, it is necessary to have a few superstars visibly raking in the money, and it is necessary to continue to depict art as an end in itself. In the space between these two joys—the anticipated thrill of success, and the pleasure of the art-making itself—most artists get lost.

  There are, of course, paths to art-making that don’t truck (mostly) with the Art World. Graffiti and street art, Davis argued, are essentially reactions to neoliberalism—reflections of the decline of the industrial core of so many cities, leaving fertile space for painting, on the one hand, and of gentrification, on the other, as advertising thrusts itself into every facet of urban life. Like the subway breakdancers who can turn an average commute into a moment of magic, graffiti typically isn’t recognized as “art,” because of where it takes place and its position outside of the law—although galleries have begun to embrace street artists, too, welcoming them inside the shifting boundaries of art worlds.39

  So-called “outsider” artists, who make their work disconnected from any art world and often even from the kind of community that shapes something like graffiti, demonstrate a few of these contradictions. Untrained, perhaps intensely isolated, religious, or mentally ill artists who appear to have made their work simply to please themselves, these artists are often laughed at until someone qualified pronounces their work “art.” Yet art critic Angella d’Avignon noted, “The art world needs outsiders more than they need the art world.” The narrative around these artists suits art’s image of itself, where brilliance is not a thing to be worked for but simply to be achieved—even if “outsider” artists put in quite a lot of work on their creations. The story of Vivian Maier, a nanny by trade whose massive oeuvre of hauntingly beautiful street photographs was found at an auction after her death, echoes this trope—she appeared to have taken her photos purely for the love of them, never attempting to show them in public. In a way, the “outsider” or “naïve” artist is the ideal artist: working on their own with no hope or even desire for payment or acknowledgment, with no study and no one teaching them skills, they produce something surprisingly brilliant for no one’s edification but their own. Yet Maier proved so confounding to the man who “discovered” her that he made a documentary about “finding” her—when confronted with someone who appears to actually have done her work for love, despite all our cultural programming, we have a hard time comprehending her.40

  It has been the support workers of the art world of late who have stood up to demand recognition as workers. Art museum staff picked up the example set by the MoMA workers in the 1970s and have been joining unions. Workers at the New Museum in New York helped set off this wave, challenging the museum’s management to live up to its progressive reputation and recognize the workers’ organization. Their campaign began in 2018 with the support of the MoMA workers and UAW Local 2110, to which the MoMA union belongs; in reaction, the museum hired an anti-union law firm. The crackdown backfired, though. Told that “unions are for coal miners” (perhaps a conscious echo of that critic of the Artists’ Union), the workers nevertheless overwhelmingly voted for the union. Workers at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles were less successful; when they made their union drive public, the private museum simply shut its doors, firing them all. “I think that arts labor is really viewed as the sort of privileged sector of labor that, you know, people who are working in the arts often have college degrees or postgraduate degrees, and that somehow this is not our main source of income or is not our livelihood or is in some way that we are not serious workers,” Izzy Johnson, one of the Marciano workers, told reporters. But the wave continued, with a spreadsheet circulating online in 2019, on which art institution workers anonymously shared their salary information, creating a broad picture of a low-paying industry and giving workers more fuel for organizing.41

  During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, art workers faced a swath of new challenges. In a world suddenly divided into “essential” and “nonessential” work, artists topped a poll asking respondents to rank the least (and most) essential jobs. Museum workers faced furloughs and layoffs; yet, as Bryan Cook, a member of the new union at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, noted, art is also one of the things that people want “on the other side of this,” a thing that gives people “something to live for.” Workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), who had begun organizing around the salary spreadsheet, went public with their union drive in the middle of the pandemic. “Now, more than ever, when things are so uncertain,” said Sarah Shaw, a museum educator at the PMA, “this is the time when we need the power of collective bargaining, and to have a voice in these incredibly important decisions that are being made.” In August, 89 percent of the workers voted for the union amid layoffs.42

  It can still be difficult for artists themselves to conceive of their problems as collective issues, rather than individual ones. Artists, suggests artist and designer Bill Mazza, tend to be more antiauthoritarian than explicitly political. It’s an alignment that suits the lone artist, whose instinct, often, is to make art about it—perhaps to make the problem visible, but often to stop short of offering a solution or taking collective action.43

  Art and parenting, in this way, are oddly similar. One of a series of writers who tackled the question of art and mothering, Heather Abel, gestured to a photo of the sculptor Ruth Asawa taken by Imogen Cunningham, of Asawa making art while her children played. “This photo served as a challenge: if I really cared about my kids, I’d create art only while watching them,” Abel wrote. “It was only much later that I realized Imogen Cunningham had posed her photo. That tableau must have lasted only as long as the flick of a camera lens, and then the baby was wet and crying, and the older children jabbed each other with wire.” The challenge of finding time and space to make art is here contrasted with the everyday work of parenting, but still, ultimately, portrayed as a personal problem rather than a social one.44

  Some of the more successful art-world organizing has indeed used artistic interventions to make political change. The Guerrilla Girls challenged the art world’s sexism through their costumed performances and creative posters, taking the problem Abel described and turning it around, demanding inclusion into museums and galleries. If artists’ work is not supported, if artists must find a way to self-sustain, then women, who remain responsible for so much caring labor, will find the odds of breaking into the mythic meritocracy stacked against them. “The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left-wing, often radically left-wing. This is going from the poorest artists to the highest paid curators in institutions,” artist Kerry Guinan argued. “But, if this is the case that we are a field in which everyone is all left-wing values, then why are we all agreed that the art world is a piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits artists, relies on unpaid labor?” Guinan continued, “This, to me, is living proof that art cannot change the world and that is why we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually really have and how power needs to be built. It doesn’t come naturally and it is not a divine gift you get by being an artist.”45

  The reality is that today’s successful artist is more likely a cottage industry held up by support workers who are made invisible just as women in the home have long been invisible. Damien Hirst is one such example: his massive success led novelist and journalist Hari Kunzru to describe him as “art that is the market—a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue.” Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull was sold for $100 million. ARTnews described his business thus: “He has a company, Other Criteria, that licenses his imagery, creates products, and sells them on the Web. In addition to Hirst’s own prints, editions, books, posters, and T-shirts, the company markets the wares of other artists. And this is just one piece of an umbrella corporation, Science Ltd.,
that oversees Hirst’s vast studios, 120 employees, and other business interests.” These artists aren’t middle class: they are capitalists, employing workers to produce commodities for them that they can sell at (often a stupendous) profit.46

  Jeff Koons, meanwhile, laid off a chunk of his assistants at his “round-the-clock studio” after rumors surfaced that they were considering unionizing. “I was in this room when I got to the studio and there are no windows and I was working a night shift,” said Lucia Love of the Art and Labor podcast, who did a stint in Koons’s “Factory.” “For the time that I was there, I never saw sunlight, really. It was very brightly fluorescent lit. It was incredibly painful because the thing we had to do was like mix 200 minutely different colors. Then, there were these mass firings all the time where they wanted to demoralize you, but they were also like, ‘Well, we just finished a show. We can’t justify keeping everybody hired.’”47

  Assistants are nothing new to art, of course, and some of them may even be paid well and treated fairly, and possibly one day launched into their own individual careers. But their names remain missing from the gallery wall, whether they are paint-mixers in Koons’s “factory” or industrial workers making the likes of Richard Serra’s massive metal Torqued Ellipses (though at least the description at Dia: Beacon, where those ellipses are housed, does mention them, if not by name). Kara Walker’s gargantuan Sugar Sphinx, displayed in Brooklyn’s soon-to-be-renovated Domino Sugar factory, was “built from Walker’s sketches by a team of nearly 20 fabricators, the 3-D sculpting and milling firm Digital Atelier, and Sculpture House Casting,” according to New York magazine; later in the article, Walker’s assistants appear like ghosts in a throwaway sentence, unnamed, but briefly, at least, acknowledged. Kehinde Wiley’s art, author and painter Molly Crabapple pointed out, is now painted by assistants in his Chinese studio; he told New York in 2012, “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!” Crabapple responded, “I am happy that his work exists. It is beautiful. I just don’t like the myth that he is the one who is painting it. Why can’t we have movie credits for art? Because there is a lot of work that you cannot do yourself. You just need a credits list. That is all. And fair payment.”48

  Even as these “superartists” become household names, visual artists struggle with the devaluation of their work that the Internet has made possible. If mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, created problems for art, the problems of lightning-fast digital distribution have multiplied them. Astra Taylor wrote, “New-media thinkers believe social production and amateurism transcend the old problem of alienated labor by allowing us to work for love, not money, but in fact the unremunerated future they anticipate will only deepen a split that many desperately desire to reconcile.” A wonderful efflorescence of amateur creativity has been brought on by the Internet, the argument goes, and why should we care if any of those people get paid when they appear not to? Yet Taylor pointed out, drawing on her own experiences as a filmmaker, that art production is expensive, and just because her films can now be seen on the Internet (potentially for free or on a streaming service for a fraction of the cost of a movie ticket) doesn’t mean they have become free to produce. “Due to technological shifts,” she wrote, “all manner of creative works have effectively become open access, and now we need to fund them.”49

  The Internet can be a way for artists to make money, too. Crabapple noted that selling prints of her work online and taking commissions made art sustainable for her in a way that a more traditional art career would not have. “Basically, you are expected to front all of the money and fund yourself to produce a show. That show sits in a room for a month and then, if that show sells, you get good money. But, if that show doesn’t, you are just out a year’s work and that is not sustainable for me.” But tech companies would rather not share the wealth with those who use their platforms to create. The example of Vine, a short video service that briefly brought stardom to a handful of Internet personalities—and extra dollars to its parent company, Twitter—is instructive. When a handful of Vine creators with millions of followers demanded that the company pay them for their creations, it instead pulled the plug on the platform. Writer Malcolm Harris noted, “The important lesson from the story is that platforms would rather disappear entirely than start collectively bargaining with talent.”50

  Whether Vine creators are “artists” is beyond the reach of this book; the point is that the celebration of amateur creativity, of work done out of love, is often the velvet glove over an iron fist that will crack down quickly on any resistance. In November 2019, I attended a talk in an art gallery in London about the “future of work.” During the question-and-answer session, two different artists referred to their abusive relationship with the art world. Young people work very hard to be accepted to exclusive art schools, noted OK Fox of the Art and Labor podcast; at the same time, they are drawn to those schools in many cases because they were misfits, or disillusioned by the vision of the capitalist workplace on offer. Those same young people go on to work incredibly hard for years in the hope of maybe becoming a professional artist one day, both Fox and Lucia Love said, shaping their lives around this desire only to find out that the art world doesn’t love them back. Those art schools, noted longtime arts industry worker Natasha Bunten, often turn out graduates with no idea how to make a career in their field, how to gain funding, or where there might be jobs that would pay. Artists are still likely to be held to the fringes, despite Richard Florida’s cheery framework: the flipside of the Koons Factory is the hollowed-out industrial spaces that artists claim for themselves. After the 2016 fire at Ghost Ship, an artists’ collective in an old warehouse in rapidly gentrifying Oakland, California, which killed thirty-six people, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl of Red Wedge Magazine wrote, “America hates its artists. America hates its young working-class people.” The victims of the fire, they argued, “are victims of an art and music economy that doesn’t work for the majority of artists and musicians. They are dead because art has become financialized. They are dead because gentrification is taking away our right to the city—and pushing artists and young workers to the margins—especially (but not only) artists of color.”51

  Creativity in all these ways has been turned from a basic human quality, one that anyone is capable of expressing, to a private preserve, enclosed behind the boundaries of its own world. The narrative that artists will create solely for the love of it—a fact that might be true if all humans had the stability and the free time and resources with which to do so—is used to justify a variety of exploitative practices rather than to call for an opening up of art worlds to all. Yet despite it all, art remains both essential and the deepest of pleasures. As Alison Stine wrote at Talk Poverty: “When I feel like I have nothing, I can give my son the gift of creativity, the gift of imagination, the gift of spending a happy hour painting cardboard on the porch.”52

  We will not make the world friendlier for artists by denying that their work is work, however, even as we should—and do—acknowledge the joy of creating. Rather, art workers will have to do that, as Kerry Guinan said, by organizing. Natasha Bunten cofounded the Cultural Workers Education Center in New York City because her years working in the world of fine arts had left her frustrated with the exploitation that surrounded her. The granddaughter of an artist who seeded a modest foundation to support art and craft workers, Bunten went to art school as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at New York University; she did unpaid internships before landing a job at the Guggenheim and moving to consulting. “What happened for me personally was that it became clear that the work that I needed to do was about people in my own community and people with whom I have class solidarity,” Bunten said. That led her to researching the issue of labor in the art world, and looking at unionization practices in other ind
ustries in which she saw similarities.

  Inspired by the work of organizing campaigns in other parts of the service industry—home care workers, domestic workers, and food-service workers, in particular—she began to ask how the art world could learn from these strategies. “One of the big glaring voids that I kept butting my head up against was this issue of how we talk about the art world as this insular thing,” she said. “When you start to look at the way in which an artist in their studio is functionally an isolated worker that is producing something that then goes into the market, their isolation is not dissimilar from the isolation of a home health-care worker.” The art world also intertwines with public education and the broader nonprofit industrial complex, yet, Bunten said, it is still treated as unique. She and her colleagues launched the Cultural Workers Education Center in 2019 to begin to make space for education and organizing for art workers, and they were thrilled with the response—in particular, the interest in discussions about organizing. Bunten said, “For us the answer has always been the collective. These systemic issues can’t be addressed by targeting one person, by acting as an individual. They can only be addressed when we start to understand our collective needs and our collective rights and to demand those rights alongside our peers.”