Art Metropole

#15092

Waging Culture: Interrogating the Canadian visual artist labour force

Date

2022

Publisher

Art Gallery of York University

Format

Monographs

ISBN

ISBN 978-0-921972-80-8

Size

18 × 25 × 2.8 cm

Length

96 pp

Genre

Criticism, Politics

Over the past ten years, Michael Maranda of the Art Gallery of York University has been conducting the Waging Culture survey of the socio-economic status of professional visual artists in Canada. The data collected from this survey has brought forward a picture of a sector where the majority of the primary producers are essentially working for free, supplying the raw material with which the entire contemporary art sector functions. For those familiar with the sector, that day-jobs pay the rent for artists is not that surprising, but a solid, data-driven illustration of the extent of the need for such side-hustles is important to truly understand the intertwined mechanics of the sector.
This book, drawing primarily on the 2017 survey, includes a speculative look at some of the drivers of the artist labour force. In particular, we contrast a sales-driven winner-take-all model that exacerbates income inequality with a much more equitable grant-driven work-preference model. Accompanying this analysis, we also describe some of the perverse correlations of educational achievement to financial success in the field, with “profitable” artistic practices being negatively correlated to educational achievements.