Tower of Sleep

How to Find a Better Life? Nina Power reviews ‘Are you working too much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art’

precariousworkersbrigade:

How to Find a Better Life?

Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood eds., Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art. Sternberg Press, 216pp, £10.95, ISBN 9781934105313

reviewed by Nina Power, Review 31The notes at the back of this latest e-flux collection state that one group of contributors, the Precarious Workers Brigade, ‘have a policy of including information on the context in which their work appears.’ To this end, they detail the dates when the piece was written (March - April 2011), the number of people involved in writing it (nine), that their text is also available online for free and is licenced under a Creative Commons licence, how they spent the $750 they were paid for the article (‘collective investment’) and the fact that e-flux journal employed two interns to work on the journal the article appeared in.

How much were these interns paid? $0 an hour. This single line sums it all up: the ‘work’ of the art world, and the increasing tendency of all work, is predicated on the fact that those at the bottom (and increasingly the middle) will do everything for nothing. But why, ask the editors, ‘should so many talented and hyper-qualified artists submit themselves willingly to a field of work … that offers so little in return for such a huge amount of unremunerated labor?’ Why indeed? The editors talk of the combination of structural exploitation and self-exploitation that characterises the ‘pseudo-professionalism’ of work in the art world (and we could include in this description not only artists, but curators, art writers, and all those at the less glamorous end of the gallery/museum/art fair spectrum). This unhappy situation in the art world (and the rest of the world) is the crux of the collection at hand.

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   Trota Campos says: “this...academic precariat.” Choose resistance, action

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