INVISIBLE ART WORK OR UNTIL WHEN WILL WE REPRODUCE THE EXPLOITATION OF LABOR IN THE ARTS?

Marxist art history has spoken eloquently about art works and the ways in which their production, circulation, and consumption are conditioned by social history. I, however, am interested in social history only in so far as it is useful for the present and the perennial and omnipresent issue of exploitation of labor in the arts. This is an issue that I term the paradox of art that lies in the fact that what artists do is not recognized as a form of labor and is therefore not appropriately remunerated nor socially protected. If and when that is the case, the reason for paying art workers is commonly not because art is a form of labor but because it is deemed an exceptional type of activity, often equated with a form of creativity that needs to be impervious to material considerations. But how do we fit this problem into the context of art history and how come this exploitation is not a more prominent feature of Marxist approaches in art history and the social history of art? Art history’s focus is the study of objects and the life that art assumes on its own. Abstracted from the process of labor, it is not unusual that we inevitably forget that art is a form of work and that artists are workers. What is more, the issue at hand is that this labor is exploited by design, which is institutionally and discursively supported and reproduced by various disciplines. In other words, even when labor is the focus of analysis in art history, artistic labor is not considered in terms of its exploitation.