Why Are You Working for Free? Examining Arts Labor

Alexis Clements is a Brooklyn-based artist, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Bitch Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, Nature, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. She has led workshops and moderated panels exploring labor issues within the arts. In this episode, Alexis and podcast host Daniel DiGriz discuss the economic realities of arts labor. Alexis provides a careful and nuanced examination of the forces impacting payment for visual artists, organizing efforts in the US and beyond, and philanthropy in the arts.The myths about how artists make money:“There’s an enormous amount of shame around money, particularly when people aren’t earning a lot of it, and there’s shame around excess money—in the art world, you have both groups meeting up against each other: at the top you have people spending huge sums of money to purchase artwork, and at the bottom, people are ashamed to talk about money because they think they’re the only ones not making any.”“The art market is intensely unstable and variable for an individual artist—the stats about ‘the good years’ in terms of making money over the course of a career puts it at 2.2 out of 16 years. That’s how it works—you don’t get career retrospectives at MoMA every year, you get one.”“The artist’s income is incredibly variable, so you have to have something that builds stability, even if you’re the 1% artist–even for those artists, there’s instability.”“I just gave a talk where I mentioned the two primary myths of success in the arts. One: ‘In order to be successful I must make all of my money off of my creative output alone’, and two: ‘I should spend all my time on my creative output.’ Those are complete myths.”“Artists are trying to access the data and find out what the earnings are for artists—‘how much income is derived from creative work?’ is a particularly thorny question.”“There is a shame around making money off of swag or reproductions or something else that isn’t art—but that is making money off of art.”The realities of funding in the arts:“Art is unpredictable, the kind of content that we really crave and want in art is often very provocative, and funders in the nonprofit space are excruciatingly risk-averse…this makes it very difficult for artists to access money to generate genuinely provocative work.”“Some great models I’ve seen in terms of philanthropy are people pooling resources together rather than individual funders, because the nonprofit system in the US—like the visual arts marketplace—encourages nonprofits and funders to think of each other as competition and that they need to put their personal mark on things.”“People have been trying to get rid of the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] for a really long time….I hope everyone listening to this knows that when there are right-leaning people in power, the discussion becomes ‘let’s defund the NEA’—it’s an annual tradition.”“People respond to art because it’s insightful or mixes things up in exciting ways and most humans understand that it’s a form of innovation and it’s part of what makes art so important to our culture—what has happened is the proliferation of the ‘creative economy’ has cheapened the understanding of what creativity really is.”On organizing for visual artists:“Artists are a constituency; by collaborating and...