Artistic Labor in Late Capitalism
(Image credit : kortina.nyc)
In the early 1970s, Mierle Laderman Ukeles knelt on the floor of a New York museum and scrubbed its steps. The action was not a gesture of humility but a declaration. In her Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969) and the subsequent performances that followed, Ukeles insisted that the labour sustaining culture — cleaning, caring, repairing — was neither marginal nor invisible. It was the work that made art possible.
Half a century later, her insight feels less prophetic than diagnostic.
Contemporary art now operates inside an economy where artistic labour is fragmented across grants, residencies, visas, shipping contracts, social media metrics, and unpaid internships. The studio has become only one node in a complex logistical network. The artist’s working day extends far beyond making: it includes writing funding applications, managing intellectual property, negotiating insurance, performing institutional diplomacy, and maintaining an online presence that is itself a form of continuous, unpaid work.
The romantic image of the autonomous artist has not disappeared. It has been monetised.
This shift became visible in the 1990s, when public funding structures in Europe and North America contracted and museums adopted corporate governance models. Artists were required to become entrepreneurs of the self. Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001) captured this moment with unnerving precision. Her frenetic recital of curatorial praise, donor gratitude, and institutional flattery exposed how affective labour — enthusiasm, gratitude, compliance — had become part of the job description. The artist was no longer simply a producer of work, but a performer of gratitude.
At the same time, artists began to make labour itself visible as a historical and political condition.
Allan Sekula’s long-term project Fish Story (1989–95) traced the global maritime routes that underpin contemporary capitalism. Ports, container ships, and dock workers became the true infrastructure of the art world, linking biennales, art fairs, and museums into a planetary supply chain. Sekula revealed that every exhibition rests on a hidden choreography of freight, fuel, and human effort.
Where Sekula mapped labour’s geography, Mierle Laderman Ukeles returned to its ethics. In Touch Sanitation (1979–80), she shook hands with over 8,500 New York sanitation workers, thanking them individually for “keeping New York City alive.” The artwork existed not as an object but as a contract of recognition — a social acknowledgement that maintenance work is cultural work.
By the early 2000s, artists confronted the moral contradictions of a globalised art economy.
Santiago Sierra paid migrant workers to stand in galleries, hold up walls, or remain inside shipping crates. The works were ethically uncomfortable by design. Sierra did not offer solutions; he staged exploitation so that it could not be ignored. The gallery became a mirror of the labour conditions it depended upon.
Teresa Margolles, working with materials from morgues and crime scenes in Mexico, embedded the labour of mourning and forensic care within the museum. In What Else Could We Talk About? (2009), she used cloths soaked in the blood of drug-war victims to clean the Venetian pavements during the Biennale, making the invisible labour of death care inseparable from the spectacle of global culture.
Digital platforms intensified this condition.
When Amalia Ulman staged Excellences & Perfections (2014) on Instagram, she revealed how artistic labour had migrated into algorithmic space. Identity became a form of work: every post a micro-contract with attention economies, every gesture measured, ranked, and monetised. The performance demonstrated that visibility itself had become labour — continuous, extractive, and unpaid.
Hito Steyerl traced the same economy from another angle. In How Not to Be Seen (2013) and Factory of the Sun(2015), she showed how images circulate as raw material, harvested by platforms, militaries, and corporations. The artist becomes both producer and product, generating data that feeds systems far beyond the museum.
Labour, however, is never abstract. It is racialised, gendered, and historically uneven.
Lubaina Himid’s paintings reconstruct the suppressed histories of Black labour in Britain, from domestic service to maritime trade, insisting that artistic production cannot be separated from colonial economies.
Coco Fusco’s performances expose how cultural labour reproduces colonial spectacle, revealing the body itself as a site of extraction.
Tania Bruguera’s Arte Útil redefines artistic work as civic responsibility, insisting that the labour of art must operate inside political reality rather than above it.
By the 2010s, resistance became infrastructural.
Gulf Labor Artist Coalition exposed labour abuses behind the construction of Saadiyat Island’s museums, forcing institutions to confront the human cost of cultural prestige.
W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) established certification standards for artist fees, translating ethics into enforceable contracts.
Museum workers, art handlers, and educators organised unions, revealing that the art world is sustained by a vast, precarious workforce whose labour is routinely rendered invisible.
What emerges from these histories is not a single image of the contemporary artist, but a field of negotiation: between autonomy and dependency, creativity and extraction, care and commodification.
Artistic labour in late capitalism is not simply exploited.
It is contested.
Artists do not stand outside the economy. They work inside it, bending its structures, exposing its contradictions, and — at moments of collective clarity — rewriting its rules.
The significance of contemporary art lies precisely here:
not in the fantasy of freedom, but in the difficult, necessary work of making freedom thinkable.
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