9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Ben Davis
still illustrative here:
Some of [the] procedures [of design] will be familiar to painters and sculptors, and certainly to filmmakers; but for them the work will have a more inward character in its origins. Thus a painter’s first responsibility is to the truth of his own vision, even though that vision may (or maybe always does) change as his work proceeds. He may be involved with contractual responsibilities, but not to the same extent as is a designer, whose decisions will be crucially affected by them. The designer works with and for other people: ultimately this may be true of the fine-artist, but in the actual working procedure a designer’s formative decisions have a different order of freedom.25
The two modes of thinking that Potter lays out may blur together at a thousand points—as Zweig says, the issue is “a bit messy.” But the distinction is not a mere intellectual construction; it rests on something real. The opposition between art and design here is above all a difference between two different class-based notions of creative labor.
“You Do Realize What You’re Doing to Your People, Right?”
As anyone who has ever turned on a TV during a political election cycle knows, the mythical middle class plays a role in American discourse completely out of proportion with the realities of life in the United States of America. One definition of the American Dream is, of course, owning your own business and becoming an entrepreneur. Yet such rhetoric obscures the reality of the economic situation.
“By every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors (as a proportion of total national employment),” one recent study concludes.26 More people in the United States work for large enterprises than for small firms. Politicians’ ritualistic invocation of the magical “middle class” is both a way of acknowledging the realities of the mass of working people by addressing “the little guy” and of deflecting attention from these very realities by eliding the working class.
Something similar happens when we talk about the “creative industries” in the way that the NEA does, lumping together visual art, which is created relatively autonomously, with the work produced by workers hired by large corporations and media companies. The term “artist” has connotations of freedom and personal satisfaction that can be used to obscure real relationships of exploitation when it is overgeneralized to apply to any type of labor that is deemed remotely creative. (An infamous example comes from the early days of Hollywood, when executives consciously encouraged actors, cinematographers, directors, and writers to identify their work “as skilled artistry rather than labor” in an effort to stave off a wave of unionization hitting their industry.27)
Yet it remains crucial to stress that the difference between these modes of creative labor is not simply a matter of how we choose to define what we do; it is connected to how different types of labor actually operate. To illustrate this point, let’s look at a few case studies, comparing the issues faced by different kinds of creative laborers.
Visual artists have a level of independence that other creative workers don’t. This fact does not mean that they live in some paradise free of exploitation, however. In recent years, the New York group Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has drawn attention to how artists are often expected to create work for free for their own museum exhibitions, thus making professional success a kind of poisoned chalice, entailing escalating expenses without the guarantee of any solid reward.
A 1973 letter from the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton to Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator Donald Richie has served W.A.G.E. as a kind of manifesto on artists’ historical struggle to be paid for their work. Having been offered a retrospective of his films but told that it would be “all for love and honor” and that “no money is included at all,” Frampton listed the numerous people with whom he had worked or with whom he would work in the process of creating and showing his art—from the film manufacturer and processing lab personnel to projectionists and security guards—and asked why they should be paid for their work while he was not:
I, in my singular person, by making this work, have already generated wealth for scores of people. Multiply that by as many other working artists as you can think of. Ask yourself whether my lab, for instance, would print my work for “love and honor.” If I asked them, and they took my questions seriously, I should expect to have it explained to me, ever so gently, that human beings expect compensation for their work. The reason is simply that it enables them to continue doing what they do.
But it seems that, while all these others are to be paid for their part in a show that could not have taken place without me, nonetheless, I, the artist, am not to be paid.
And in fact it seems that there is no way to pay an artist for his work as an artist. I have taught, lectured, written, worked as a technician . . . and for all these collateral activities, I have been paid, have been compensated for my work. But as an artist I have been paid only on the rarest of occasions.28
Such concerns are not just a matter of pride. Frampton cites the case of legendary avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who died at age forty-four in circumstances of extreme need despite having been celebrated for her pathbreaking contributions to cinema. In her final years, she was literally reduced to begging for money to complete her work. “I leave it to your surmise whether her life might have been prolonged by a few bucks.”29
The issues of compensation that Frampton outlines remain today. In 2012, W.A.G.E. released a survey of close to one thousand New York artists, showing that “the majority (58.4 percent) of respondents did not receive any form of payment, compensation, or reimbursement for their participation [in shows at museums or nonprofits], including the coverage of any expenses.”30 According to the group, small organizations were about 10 percent more likely to pay a fee than larger ones—enough of a difference to suggest that the lack of compensation was not purely a matter of budgetary constraints but also of an institutional culture where the opportunity to show work is expected to be reward enough.31
A state of affairs that simultaneously celebrates art and devalues it is bound to provoke some angst. Returning to the orienting example of Frampton’s letter, however, it bears mentioning that there is a difference between his labor as an artist and the labor of the other workers he mentions as benefiting from his work. In fact, the difference is encoded in the nature of the dispute itself: MoMA’s security guards and projectionists cannot decide whether or not they want to perform their roles, at least not if they want to keep their jobs; Frampton, on the other hand, retains the autonomy to say no, and can therefore bargain for better terms (whether or not he is in a position to win them). This is partly because, as he himself stated, he dedicated himself independently to creating the work in question (“the irreducible point is that I have made the work, have commissioned it of myself, under no obligation of any sort to please anyone”32), which therefore exists and belongs to him whether or not a museum chooses to show it. Stripped of the specifically artistic rhetoric, therefore, Frampton’s position appears to be less that of a worker demanding a wage and more that of someone who owns property and hopes to rent it out. Indeed, it was a rental fee for his films, along with compensation for any expenses to him incurred doing the show, that Frampton ultimately demanded in his letter.
Perhaps it goes without saying that matters are hardly better when one descends into the more directly commercial world of galleries, though few of the stories about artists’ disputes with their representation ever see the light of day. In 2011, however, the artist Dana Melamed filed a complaint against her New York gallery, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art. Among other things, Melamed claimed that the gallery had sold close to $150,000 in art at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009 but had given her only $10,000 (contractually she was owed half); that the gallery had sold a number of her works at a discount without her permission; and that when she tried to recover her works from the gallery, in the words of the complaint, the “Defendants did not return Plaintiff’s art works to her but threatened to remove Plaintiff’s art work from the State of New York and to dispose it ‘on the street.’” Ultimately, the case was settled in Melamed’s favor in 2012.
“It’s very common, and that’s the problem,” she said later, when interviewed about the suit. “From what I hear from other artists, it’s very rare that they get paid on