Is Art a Job?

Why reducing art to merely a “job” is an inherently anti-artistic gesture

Transcript of a short paper I presented at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) in April 2025, responding to the prompt “Is art a job?” | Full conversation now available in Town Hall #4

Is art a job? I want to say no. Art should definitely not be considered a “job.” There are practical reasons for this, which I will note, but more than that, I want to explain how viewing art as a job has been detrimental to the arts. In 2025, arguing this might seem strange—especially considering the recent rise in discourse around so-called art workers and legitimising narratives about creative pursuits—but we must probe the assumptions that underpin these supposedly “progressive” narratives.

Firstly, we should address: What kind of “job” is art, and what function does calling it a job perform?

As art historian Angela Dimitrakaki notes, the term art worker (which generally refers to both artists and people who work in the arts) entered the popular lexicon at roughly the same time as the term “sex worker.” In both cases, the deployment of the identity of “worker” was used to counter stigma and “present both ... as fully incorporated, useful professional identities” (useful, as in, useful to capitalism and its required glorification of work).¹ Moreover, the general application of these terms—outside specifically located activist or academic contexts—conceals potentially devastating hierarchies. “Simply put,” Dimitrakaki summarises, “it’s not true that all artists are art workers, some are entrepreneurs, and some are something that would resemble slaves.” There’s a lot in between, too.

From Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, a collection of four short stories originally published in 1924, translated by Kevin Blahut & illustrated by Helena Vlčnovská (Twisted Spoon Press, 1996). This image accompanies the short story “Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk”, a story about a mouse who demands her art be acknowledged as work.

I won’t belabour this point, but—in economic terms—art is non-productive labour. To be an artist or arts worker is not the same as being a worker in the classic, or Marxian, sense. A steel worker, for instance, produces a necessary good—one indispensable to the maintenance of public infrastructure. Factory workers, healthcare workers, or others who work in essential fields can organise and revolt to improve their working conditions because their labour is essential to maintaining a functional society: that means food security, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and waste management. Artistic labour, by contrast, is not essential. Rather, its value is speculative and symbolic. Outside of specific institutional settings where changes might be achieved through unionisation or strike action, aligning art and art-adjacent labour with work and the identity of the worker is dubious.

If you google “is art non-productive labour?”, you might encounter an AI-generated summary that directly counters everything I’ve just said.

The summary I was offered reads:

No, art is not inherently non-productive labour. While it may not produce tangible goods in the same way as manufacturing, art does contribute to society, and the labour involved is valuable. Art can be a source of income, cultural enrichment, and even have a positive impact on workplace productivity.²

The description offers several dot points with further explanation, including details of the “Cultural Impact” and the “Social Benefit” of art. Notably, most of these claims centre work. For example: “Art can improve morale, enhance workplace design, and contribute to a more positive and stimulating environment.” Another asserts: “Art encourages Skill Development including technical, creative, and problem-solving skills that can be applied to other fields.”

If we accept that Google AI functions as a tool of soft ideological control that reinforces consensus values (as we should), it reveals a great deal about the ways in which contemporary culture accepts and promotes capitalist logic in relation to art. Making art “useful” in this way means that its value is assessed and determined based on how it can be instrumentalised—whether in training better white-collar workers in diverse industries or serving as a tool of social reform.

The self-conscious framing of art as work, and of artists as workers, is part of the New Left fantasy of the triumph of intellect—of the value of education, ideas, and symbolic progress—which goes hand in hand with toxic, and increasingly diabolical, credentialism, all the while borrowing from the revolutionary rhetoric of worker movements of the past by appropriating the language of class struggle.

This is not a new criticism of tendencies in art. Countless books have been written on the relation between art and managerialism, mapping how deskilling, outsourcing, and a new emphasis on socially engaged art mirror—or, more likely, are embedded in and reinforce—a culture of managerialism, which is then glossed with therapeutic language and political gesturing. For example, many essays in Sven Lütticken’s Secret Publicity (2005), particularly “Progressive Striptease”—and his later essay “General Performance” (published in e-flux)—emphasise how the participatory, relational nature of contemporary art echoes the demands of professional networking and the service economy. Claire Bishop, in her uncompromising critique of relational aesthetics, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) has astutely noted the collusion between “social art” and the self-driven—and, ironically, rather individualistic—logic of socio-economic survival in increasingly privatised neoliberal societies.

Attempting to make art productive labour—or even to frame it as such—contributes to the perversion of what art is. It is, in essence, an anti-artistic gesture.

Some of the greatest films and works of literature of the twentieth century directly addressed this assault on art. For example, in a witty scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), after James Stewart’s character has a breakdown, his faithful, do-gooder friend Midge brings music to his room in the sanatorium. “I had a long talk with the lady in musical therapy,” she tells him, “and she said Mozart’s the boy for you, Johnny—the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away. That’s what the lady said.” She continues to ramble:

It’s wonderful how they’ve got it all taped now, John. They’ve got music for melancholiacs, and music for dipsomaniacs, and music for nymphomaniacs... I wonder what would happen if somebody mixed up their files?

It’s funny, but it is also a damning reflection on the reduction of art to function—in this case, the use of classical music as a therapeutic solution: “the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away,” a reference to a tool of reproductive labour. In a similar vein, in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)—in that famous scene—Alex is forced to watch violent films accompanied by classical music as part of his state-sanctioned experimental aversion therapy. The unintended consequence is that he is not only physically sick when confronted with violence or sexual temptation, but also Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Heavy-handed, yes, but an illuminating illustration of the ways that complex emotions and desires are managed by therapeutic solutionism and—crucially—how art, an emotionally charged and potentially dangerous force when unregulated, can be manipulated in service of this.³

Today, the superficial culture of openness and encouragement makes art, as an industry, attractive to the unserious, cynical, or otherwise inept. As Noel Sheridan summarised in 1996, “If you do art as a second choice, you’ll ... clutter the place with bad art and confirm the general public’s deepest suspicion that art is some sort of soft option for losers.”⁴ Moreover, despite the guise of commitment, those masses of industry professionals who treat art merely as a job—and over-prioritise money—often fail to serve institutions well.

Sheridan argued that artists, along with avoiding pursuing art because they want “a job in an industry,” should be oppositional to institutions, and suspicious of their agendas, even if they acknowledge a symbiotic relationship. It’s important for us to note that Sheridan doesn’t mean that artists should wish to destroy institutions, or compromise them by making untenable demands (as many space-wasting artist-activists seem to think today), but rather, that independent integrity, and having a spine, matters. So does the ability to appreciate art beyond its place in trend cycles and strategically planned intra-industry collaborations. If, in the process of ceding to institutional expectations, you entirely abdicate your responsibility to art—the very cultural “product” (to use the funding board’s reductive terminology) that you, and the institutions are meant to support and protect—then these institutions will crumble. In short, if we deprive art of everybody who actually cares about it,⁵ then there will be nothing left to fund, and the taxpayers are right to resent cultural institutions and funding bodies.

Evidencing mounting distrust, the ubiquity of unreliables in influential roles has drawn increasing criticism in recent years. Case in point: in his 2024 article “Twilight of the Wonks,” Walter Russell Mead challenged the sympathetic framing of imposter syndrome in professional settings. “Imposter syndrome,” he asserts,

isn’t always the voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it’s the voice of God telling you to step down. If, for example ... you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognises only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college.⁶

Rather than a job, we might be better off thinking of art as a vocation or a calling—an idea that has fallen out of fashion in recent years, perceived at best as sentimental or juvenile, dismissive at worst. The ironic consequence of the obsessive overcorrection surrounding arts legitimation as a job is that it eclipses less tangible (or quantifiable) values art offers beyond the rigid realm of market logic. Talk of fighting the stigma associated with artistic labour doesn’t necessarily operate as a critique of capitalism, as often seems to be assumed, but instead reinforces capitalist logic while eliding a sincere appreciation of the nature of work and the nature of exploitation.

In conclusion: art is not a job.

1. Angela Dimitrakaki, “Situated Struggles: Art workers, sex workers, and the politics of freedom from work,” (paper presented at Feminist Emergency International Conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 22-24 June 2017).

2. This specific AI-generated definition was sourced in April 2025.

3. Though, we should note, the subtler point in A Clockwork Orange is that art might be dangerous and incite violence in the soul, and its democratisation may be inherently insidious.

4. Noel Sheridan, “Noel Sheridan: Why be an artist?”, clip from Leigh Hobba’s documentary Out of Analogue (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1996), see

5. It’s basically too late: we already have.

6. Walter Russell Mead, “Twilight of the Wonks,” Tablet Magazine, 27 March 2024, read