the other hand, retains the autonomy to say no, and can therefore bargain for better terms (whether or not he is in a position to win them). This is partly because, as he himself stated, he dedicated himself independently to creating the work in question (“the irreducible point is that I have made the work, have commissioned it of myself, under no obligation of any sort to please anyone”32), which therefore exists and belongs to him whether or not a museum chooses to show it. Stripped of the specifically artistic rhetoric, therefore, Frampton’s position appears to be less that of a worker demanding a wage and more that of someone who owns property and hopes to rent it out. Indeed, it was a rental fee for his films, along with compensation for any expenses to him incurred doing the show, that Frampton ultimately demanded in his letter.
Perhaps it goes without saying that matters are hardly better when one descends into the more directly commercial world of galleries, though few of the stories about artists’ disputes with their representation ever see the light of day. In 2011, however, the artist Dana Melamed filed a complaint against her New York gallery, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art. Among other things, Melamed claimed that the gallery had sold close to $150,000 in art at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009 but had given her only $10,000 (contractually she was owed half); that the gallery had sold a number of her works at a discount without her permission; and that when she tried to recover her works from the gallery, in the words of the complaint, the “Defendants did not return Plaintiff’s art works to her but threatened to remove Plaintiff’s art work from the State of New York and to dispose it ‘on the street.’” Ultimately, the case was settled in Melamed’s favor in 2012.
“It’s very common, and that’s the problem,” she said later, when interviewed about the suit. “From what I hear from other artists, it’s very rare that they get paid on time.”33 This humiliating state of affairs is the reality of life even as a modestly successful artist, and the incident was widely taken as a cautionary tale about how artists need more legal protections.34
For the purposes of our comparison, though, some points about the specific character of Melamed’s dispute are worth emphasizing. First of all, the issue did not arise at the point of the production of the artworks in question but rather from how they were circulated and sold. Second, the relationship between artist and gallery owner is explicitly conceived of, and even codified in law, as being akin to that between two business owners, with Melamed, as a producer, entering into a consignment agreement with the gallery to provide her with a service: marketing the work and brokering sales. Unlike in the case of a worker hired to produce an object for an employer, who can then sell the resulting product for whatever he deems necessary to turn a profit, Melamed’s grievance rests on a visual artist’s putative right to continue to have a say over the products of her labor, even when they are out of her hands.
The issue of visual artists’ rights over their works, even after sale, has been of historical importance, from the struggles over intellectual property that ignited the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York in the late 1960s35 to contemporary debates over whether artists deserve “resale royalties” for works sold on the secondary market.36 Yet—and here is the important point, since we are talking about art and class—this kind of intimate connection with the products of one’s labor is exactly what working-class people are denied by definition as a result of the quid pro quo that forms the central dynamic of a capitalist economy: trading your labor power for a wage. In fact, Marx’s description of working-class “alienation” reads as a direct reversal of the characteristics ascribed to artistic labor (that is, that it may be pursued for personal satisfaction as well as monetary reward, or that it reflects some personal vision or investment): “The worker . . . is only himself when he does not work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”37
Having looked at issues faced by visual artists, now let us consider some examples of disputes from another realm of the “creative economy” to see what the properly “alienated” form of creative labor looks like.
The production of software is one of the key examples offered by post- industrial theorists to prove that we have entered a new economy based on “immaterial labor”38; video gaming has grown to be the single largest arm of the entertainment world, surpassing the Hollywood giants that gave Adorno nightmares.39 Countless numbers of talented computer engineers are drawn into the orbit of the video game industry because of the cachet of working in a dynamic and creative field. In 2004, an anguished blog post by the anonymous fiancée of one engineer at Electronic Arts (EA)—a company that has become a Fortune 500 behemoth in part by cannibalizing scores of independent game studios—described labor conditions where seven-day workweeks had gone from being an exception, used during “crunch” periods when completing a game, to mandatory, with no comp time, sick days, or overtime being offered. Management hid behind an exemption to California labor law for skilled “specialty” workers; complaints about physical and mental exhaustion by programmers were met with the refrain, “If they don’t like it, they can work someplace else.” The anonymous “EA Spouse” concluded her blog post:
If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. “What’s your salary?” would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you’re doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it’s not just them you’re hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?
Right?40
The post touched off widespread outrage in the developer community and led to several successful class-action lawsuits. In one, EA programmer Leander Hasty (revealed to be the significant other of Erin Hoffman, also known as the “EA Spouse”) stated that while they are classified as skilled laborers, he and his fellow programmers “do not perform work that is original or creative and have no management responsibilities and are seldom allowed to use their own judgment.” In essence, for these computer programmers, the new creative economy had come to look very much like an old-fashioned Fordist assembly line, as one industry watcher put it.41
Another case: In 2012, a new push began to unionize the several hundred visual effects and animation artists at Sony Imageworks. A union drive had overwhelmingly been voted down almost a decade before, but in the interim benefits for the non-union animators had drastically eroded, even as the department became more central to Sony’s operations, churning out multiple blockbusters. “No one seemed to want to admit that those benefits could all be taken away at a moment’s notice,” the animators attempting to organize their workplace told one industry website, “and they all eventually were.”42 Company policy appeared to be to dodge, as much as possible, the burden of offering any serious retirement or health benefits, consigning workers to permanent freelance status.
When a website dedicated to female professionals wrote a particularly sycophantic profile of Sony executive Michelle Raimo Kouyate, stressing how she maintained great work-life balance (“don’t even try to tell Michelle that her rich home life—part of which unfolds at her family’s vacation home in West Africa—needs come at the expense of her career”43), an anonymous Imageworks employee offered an angry rejoinder on the union’s blog: “How do I care for my family without health insurance, sick days or vacation days while working mandatory twelve hour days, six days a week for months on end? Is the value of my children or even myself less than others?” For the author, the answer to ending this sorry state of affairs was the answer that working-class people have always turned to: “I think we can work towards all of these goals, by organizing.”44
EA computer programmers and Sony animators may not fit our stereotypical definition of what the “working class” looks like.
