Paddy Johnson

Instead of Exploiting Artists, Pay Them
Paddy Johnson, New York Times

Paddy Johnson is the executive director of the blog Art F City and is an art critic for The L Magazine.

Most artists I know constantly make art. It’s built into who they are; a bit of scrap Play-Doh lying around the house will become a movable sculpture, or a napkin at a dinner party will serve as an impromptu sketch pad. It’s not just a trade; it's a particular way of communicating with the world.

Asking whether it's too expensive to pursue the arts is a little like asking whether it's too expensive to read or write. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t stop.

The arts industry, at all levels, is subsidized not just by the labor of artists, but by their quality of life.

Making art is not an economic decision for most artists, who are continually exploited for their ideas and labor. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in New York, where real estate developers knowingly solicit artists to lease raw workspace, only to impose rent hikes once the building has been renovated. Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, forced out approximately 100 artists from their studios this year by increasing the rent by as much as 50 percent. The organization is currently the co-host of a 100,000 square foot exhibition benefiting artists who lost their studios to Hurricane Sandy in the same building where artists lost their studios to the market.

Meanwhile the payment of artist fees has never been mandated at a federal, state or municipal level, which means nonprofits — often starving themselves — frequently do not pay artists. When Whitney Biennial artist Dawn Kasper created a makeshift studio space at the museum (because she couldn't afford one) she also applied for unemployment insurance, because she otherwise wasn't being compensated.

Like many artists, Kasper holds a masters degree in fine arts, a professional degree that’s increasingly becoming more of a liability than an asset. After all, if students can’t pay back their loans over the course of their lifetime, what good is the degree?

Sheila Lewandowski of The Chocolate Factory Theater recently said that the arts industry, at all levels, is subsidized by the (mostly free) labor of artists. I'll add here that their somewhat compromised quality of life is also a form of payment. Artists are the people who are willing to put up with a job that doesn’t pay the bills and spend their days applying for grants that may offer as little as $1,000. They do this all for the joy of making art. These efforts in effect subsidize every other industry in the city by making it a more interesting and desirable place to visit and live, so maybe it’s time we spent a little more time figuring out how to support artists.