In Terms Of

Tag: Art in General

  • Paying Artists, from MoMA to Momenta Art

    W.A.G.E.: How Creative Labor Should Be Compensated
    Thursday, December 11, 2014
    CUE Art Foundation
    Joan Mitchell Foundation, Art Education Center,New York

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    Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization

    Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.

    Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.

    Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.

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    Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle

    W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”

    The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.

    The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.

    W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.

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    Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets

    Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?

    I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.

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  • Occupy Art World

    Off the Clock: Working with Flexible Labor, Social Networks, and Everyday Life
    Tuesday, October 11, 2011
    Art in General, New York

    Whether it was the furor of the first few weeks of Occupy Wall Street or the popularity of the presenters, more than one hundred listeners packed the main gallery space of Art in General to hear a discussion on “what the neoliberal economy has imposed on artists,” according to one panelist, and on what the art world’s 99 percent can do to get ahead. Cosponsored by Silvershed, “Off the Clock: Working with Flexible Labor, Social Networks, and Everyday Life” allowed four panelists and a moderator to thrash out the intersections of art, labor, and community. The audience for the standing-room-only event was young and good looking, largely comprising people in their twenties and thirties. The panel addressed—but didn’t seem to latch too strongly on—what I feel are two main pillars of thought: fair trade and free trade, which I respectively define as demanding compensation for labor and developing a new attitude toward money, that is, payment is not necessary and everything should be free. Instead the participants described their work and how it related to the panel and spoke generally about inequities.

    The artist, writer, and educator Liam Gillick introduced the participants. The artist Lise Soskolne of Working Artists for a Greater Economy, or W.A.G.E., informed the crowd that her group will soon publish results from a recent survey of New York artists. She claimed that 60 percent of them did not get paid for their exhibitions from 2007 to 2010. W.A.G.E., Soskolne promised, will develop and disseminate a fee schedule and best practices soon. The group is working with Artists Space, which does pay its exhibiting artists, to open that nonprofit organization’s books and host additional panels, discussions, and think tanks. I really wish W.A.G.E. was more active—or that its website reflected a high level of activity, if that is indeed the case.

    The panelists, from left: Summer Guthery, Rose Marcus, Jackson Moore, Lise Soskolne, and James Voorhies (photograph by Pat Lian)

    Jackson Moore from the Public School New York briefly described his project, which holds classes but offers neither grades nor degrees. Teachers volunteer their time and knowledge, and students likewise do the same—sharing and learning are their own rewards. Moore’s summary was not particularly informative or enlightening.

    For me, the Dependent Art Fair, a one-night event held at a budget Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan last March, was a fun Armory Show week party. Its organizer, the artist and curator Rose Marcus, aimed to counter the hackneyed model of the hotel art fair with, well, another hotel art fair offering high-quality content from a select group of artists, dealers, and curators. This is the raison d’être of all art fairs, no? Except for me, “everyone was in on a joke,” she recalled. At the same time, the fair “was also not ironic.”

    The curator Summer Guthery presented the most interesting project of the night, the Chrysler Series, which took place in the notoriously hard-to-get-into landmark building. She held regularly scheduled evening events in an emptied office on the thirty-first floor, which also allowed visitors to escape through a window onto a patio ledge from which you could actually touch the large metal radiator caps that decorate the building’s midsection. Guthery had no funding, but the experience was priceless—I should know, as I was lucky to attend the first event, for which an artist friend, Kevin Regan, contributed a piece. The Chrysler Series was exclusive by necessity: the restricted building and limited space allowed artists to invite only a couple guests each. Guthery observed that a mostly random mix of strangers— architects and filmmakers ascending the building in elevators with ornate inlaid wooden panels—were more successful than groups of her friends. For the events, Guthery enjoyed thinking small and looking closely, with a focus on practice, not products. Is this elitism? “I’m fine with a little snobbishness in art,” she conceded.

    Liam Gillick (photograph by Pat Lian)

    Full of big words and strange terms, Gillick claimed that new practices need a coalition of workers. He is against the “privatization of general intellect,” but I’m not sure what “garbage operatives” are. Gillick favors projects that aren’t “leveraged on certain hierarchies of power” and is “looking for new geographies and new landscapes to occupy” to “make an educated gesture.” When he searches for alternative models or “conditions of being,” he unsurprisingly reaches for the established, popular theorists on his bookshelf. He should instead be thumbing through his record collection. Independent record labels that sprang up after punk—Dischord, Touch and Go, Drag City, and so on—provide several key success stories for making a living with integrity apart from a monolithic corporate industry, though I understand unsavory business practices among record producers, promoters, and venue owners were common in this sphere. Nevertheless, successful DIY models can be found far and wide, both in and outside the art and academic worlds.

    About ten to fifteen years older than the others, Gillick was the only panelist to demonstrate historical grounding, noting that, in decades past, artists were much more passionate about the issues at stake and often at each other’s throats. We are now softer today, for better or worse, and also more professional. The bureaucracy of today’s nonprofit arts world is much different than the 1970s, when galleries formed and projects were started because money from the National Endowment for the Arts was easy to come by. What can we do today? Gillick would like someone to enforce a “super minimum wage,” perhaps starting with the government funding agencies. The New York State Council on the Arts, he said, requires recipients to prove that they pay artists. All applicants claimed they did so, but he is unsure about enforcement. If it could be achieved, self-regulation would act as a “shaming mechanism” in the arts, potentially starting a domino effect for art institutions. Gillick called for an artist’s honorarium separate from travel expenses and installation costs. “It’s very simple,” he said, and I agree. Such line items can easily appear in organizational budgets, and even a modest stipend speaks volumes about value. Alternative organizations change as artists’ needs change, Gillick said, but I wonder how quickly this is really happening. Artists tend to go after their own, he observed, which I took to mean complaining about major commercial galleries and big shots such as Larry Gagosian, when they should begin effecting change in the nonprofits instead. Get your own house in order before you step outside to bring down Goliath. Gillick then wondered, why turn to institutions and not artists? He wants to “organize.” Marcus wants to “unionize.”

    The fifth panelist, James Voorhies of Bureau for Open Culture, wondered about art education and schools. Moore responded vaguely and inarticulately, talking about lines on the CV and having your name attached to an institution. He believes it is okay to work for free, without specifying when, where, why, and how. Gillick is also trying to acknowledge this condition and to make it acceptable, in order “to elevate people as human beings.” This sounds good, and volunteering should be encouraged, in some but certainly not all cases. Moore proposed that the Public School is “an attempt to be posteconomic,” though he seems to favor dissolving intellectual-property rights through the scarcity of artists’ knowledge. (My notes seem to be as confusing as his words.) Marcus wondered if she would repeat the Dependent. I wonder if the Sheraton staff loved the crowds and noise enough to host the art fair again. I hope she does, because an annual event brings name-brand recognition. If done right a brand can also support a completely different event without falling prey to institutionalization.

    Guthery talked about her success with the Chrysler Series: people looked closer at the work, and no one left early. Most of us will never get the chance to be inside the Chrysler Building again. Even though the office architecture was oppressively inescapable, she said, the space was ideal for new ideas, which seems unlike a hotel art fair, which has a longer history. Guthery is a true DIY curator. In typical form, Gillick started talking about the gentrification of the Chrysler Building. Isn’t “occupation” the preferred term now?

    The crowd at Art in General (photograph by Pat Lian)

    A panel has obviously succeeded when the ideas discussed make the audience’s heads spin so fast that they have trouble articulating intelligent questions. The first person to raise his hand and speak asked a dumb meaning-of-life question about “How do you find, and continually find, inspiration?” to keep doing what you’re doing, despite the long odds. Another attendee reiterated the claim that “art school is so expensive” with “no return unless you succeed,” but isn’t this true of many academic programs? Jobs are not guaranteed for anyone, and student debt is certainly not limited to MFA graduates. Gillick reminded the crowd that not everyone in twentieth-century art went to art school. Moore mumbled something about how artists should study outside their own disciplines. Someone asked Gillick how he does all sorts of jobs (artist, curator, speaker, writer, etc.) without getting into trouble. The artist attributed his promiscuity, which the British do not trust, to a “suburban lack” that an ironic, failed modernism did not fill. I wonder if this lack of specialization, or rather multiplicity of activities, reflects the difficulties of finding full-time, paying work. Gillick feels his approach is a threat and a challenge—but how much so if others who follow in his footsteps have a hard time getting paid for similar work?

    Someone else wanted to know if there was a unity to our demands. He wants a single artists’ union. Another said, “We’re not fighting for crumbs” and made a plea for unity. He or she blamed the 1970s, identity politics, and “nebulous, unclear space” for creating problems that a coalition could fix. Few would argue that the art world, comprising artists, dealers, collectors, critics and writers, curators, administrators, and more, has grown tremendously since the 1970s. It seems as if everyone involved can and should get paid. The audience’s ears and eyes are open and ready to converse—and the internet has helped further the dialogue. Gillick suggested people look up members of the NEA board over the years, to see who holds the purse strings. He also proposed that art education be compulsory, like military service. Soskolne said there are only so many places at the table for successful artists (i.e., those who earn their income directly from their art), so others work at nonprofits, which tends to bloat budgets that must pay staffers instead of funneling money to artists. Someone in the audience said it’s hard as an artist to show or publish without pay, because if you refuse an opportunity someone else will quickly nab it. Artists are replaceable. It’s going to take a while, it seems, for people to realize that the more artists say no, the more pressure and power they can exert.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

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    Silvershed has posted photographs of the event on its Flickr page.