If you are an art worker, you’ve probably been accused of making bad life decisions by your family, childhood friends, and random people who feel entitled to comment just because you happened to be at the same party.
It’s hard to argue that they were wrong. Becoming an art worker is often an awful career decision.
Underpayment and unstable working conditions are normalized to the point where artistic labor is almost always precarious. This structural precarity starkly contrasts with the capital flows of the art market. Sales on the global art market totaled about 65 billion dollars in 2023. Blue chip galleries, fairs, and auction houses thrive on the backs of underpaid art workers. A UNESCO report on the working conditions of artists in 2018 concluded: “The largest subsidy for the arts comes not from governments, patrons, or the private sector, but from artists themselves in the form of unpaid or underpaid labor.”
How is it possible that so much money is made in the arts but not by the ones who create the art? And what can art workers do to organize, demand, or create a more sustainable system of art circulation? In this series, titled Art in Permacrisis, I will discuss some of art workers’ most commonly-heard ideas for a more sustainable art economy – such as basic income or fair practices – and assess their strategic potential. But I will start with a broader reflection. How can we think about the strategic organization of art workers while the world is on fire?
Since the COVID pandemic, there’s been a lingering sense that we live in a “time of crisis”. The highly anticipated “new normal” never arrived. Instead, we’ve faced climate collapse, war in Ukraine, war in Sudan, war in DRC, genocide in Palestine, inflation, misinformation, housing shortages, and rising authoritarianism. Like the heads of a Hydra, every defeated crisis seems to reemerge multiplied. Some have described this multiplicity as a “polycrisis”, or a "stack of crises". I think the word “permacrisis” is more apt because the exceptional crisis appears to have become permanent. This is a confusing contradiction. “Crisis” describes a decisive change in the world, requiring a new normal. But if the crisis is permanent, there’s no normalcy, and, consequently, there is no more crisis. The result is an anxious state of insecurity, where everything feels broken, but it’s impossible to say exactly where history took a wrong turn, or how to set matters right. It is not unlike the 1980s’ “no future” sentiment, when people sought refuge from economic recession, political repression, and fear of the Cold War on the fringes of society, in punk culture and squatting. Regardless of the mobilization of many people worldwide, hopes for systemic improvement might be even fainter today as world powers keep prioritizing their economic interests over the destruction of the planet.
Permacrisis puts art worker organizing in a tough spot. However urgent the question of precarious artwork is, there are always more urgent crises. Every day it’s harder to rebuke the stereotypes about art. To the Left, art seems a bourgeois privilege. To conservatives, it is a hobby of “wokies”. To liberals, it is a passion-driven dream job. Art workers, painfully aware of their limitations, feel disoriented and disillusioned. As the artist Maisa Imamović said, we are “always doomed to feel guilty in our unique way.” The ritualistic habit of academics to organize debates about the “real value of art”, which always concludes that art is socially indispensable, does not seem to help much.
Waning support for art as a social good is nothing new. Thirty years ago, the “creative industries” paradigm emerged, promoting art as a profitable endeavor and leading to a series of resilience programs and industry development policies that have instrumentalized art but not improved its working conditions. Permacrisis management is merely an acceleration of this neoliberal instrumentalism, which comes in two flavors. The value of art, and its right to funding, is either determined by its competence to address urgent crises and make a “positive impact”, from relieving care workers to developing new materials to be used in the energy transition, or by being the victim of the correct crisis, e.g., human rights infringements.
Like any system of governance, the crisis economy is a system of push and pull. Participants can find their agency by studying its patterns and using them to beat the funders in their own game. If we assume the next crisis is around the corner, art workers can prepare – and strike first. Any period between crises can be used to develop tools, such as safe spaces, mutual aid networks, governance systems, and redistribution experiments. Many people working in social art practice have figured this out perfectly. But that’s not all. With the acknowledgment of permanent crisis as a dominant governance tool, we can develop our desires and self-organized tactics into a strategic counter-position. In solidarity with other workers subject to permacrisis management – in healthcare, education, public transport, and so on – we can regain a grip on the direction of history and fight for our rights together.
Fig.1
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Image Credits:
Cover: Jerónimo Rüedi, Étude #3 (2025). Photo credit: Gerhard Kassner © / Courtesy: The artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm/
Fig.1 Portrait, Sepp Eckenhaussen, courtesy of the author
