Why creative labour isn’t always seen as “real work” – and what that means for artists and designers

For the past few centuries, we’ve held the strange assumption that making art is inherently different from other types of work. Creativity, we’ve been taught, is its own reward. We can see the traces of this idea in many places: the taboo that surrounds talking about money in art schools, the persistence of unpaid design internships, and the regular propositions to pitch for free. For several decades, the price of this belief has been creatives’ difficulty in conceiving of their work as labour – and by extension, to benefit from the gains of other workers’ struggles.

Enter AI. Generative AI models require a tremendous amount of unpaid and uncredited input while simultaneously hiding the labour that drives their output. Conversely, artists have been used for centuries to work for free. It follows, then, that artificial intelligence and the creative industry are a match made in capitalist heaven. Yet, in this new world where images float in the ether of the web, and are routinely scraped, copied and generated in seconds, labour is suddenly the only thing separating artists from machines. The creative workers who were already organised before AI had a leg up in advocating for their livelihood, as seen in last year’s strikes by entertainment unions like WAG and SAG-AFTRA. But what about the rest of us? AI has only highlighted already existing problems in the industry and pressed us to think more deeply and urgently about the role of labour in the creative world.

The history of art is a history of the erasure of labour. Take patronage, the system whereby a wealthy individual, family or institution sponsors an artist. In a patronage system, the main goal of the patron isn’t necessarily to commission a particular piece of artwork, but rather to enhance their own prestige and be seen as a champion of the arts. In many historical cases, the artists themselves were not even the ones executing the actual work, but instead merely served as overseers of workshops of apprentices. While, in practice, patrons could in fact have very restrictive demands for their commissions that far exceed what any illustrator would accept today, our cultural memory of the patronage system is the dream of an artist who gets paid for being instead of doing.

After the Renaissance, the patronage system slowly gave way to an art market, which relied on a more individualised conception of the artist as a singular genius, whose work was the expression of an exceptional inner life. Once again, the work itself wasn’t the most important part of the system; creation instead was framed as a natural urge of the artist, regardless of whether they were paid for it or not. This found its strongest realisation in the nineteenth century, a period when Romantic artists were notoriously concerned with the chaos of nature and sentiment, while the Industrial Revolution forced physical labourers into increasingly exploitative workplaces. More than ever, the artist was framed as the unproductive opposite to the productive worker. In addition to having left artists in the industry unable to think critically about labour, this history has created a false dichotomy between the artist and working class.

Of course, we’re no longer in a patronage system – although platforms like Patreon have offered an alternative to a market economy for artists – and most creatives need to make a living one way or another. These days, just like other workers, designers and illustrators work for their wages. Unlike other workers, however, the old ideals tied to creativity and art change how artists relate to their work. The worst client offenders consider themselves deserving of praise for the sheer act of paying an artist at all, or worse still, demand work for free or “exposure.” Meanwhile artists are left ignoring many labour red flags for the sake of romantic self-expression and a hope that the next project will be better.

This tenuous relationship between art and labour has led the creative industry to develop “alternative” pathways for remunerating workers. One tactic, deployed whenever a client or manager knows that the work conditions or pay for a particular job are terrible, is to dangle the carrot that “it will be a great portfolio piece!” As a result, designers are incentivised to endlessly iterate in order to fulfil said promise, “which creates an environment of ruthless competition,” says designer Joe Marianek, who worked in several high-profile agencies before co-founding his studio Small Stuff. The designer becomes trapped in a cycle of working as hard as possible for proportionally lower and lower compensation in order to ensure that the work made does in fact become a good portfolio piece – lest they end up having received both low pay and nothing to show for it. Ultimately, Joe says, whether the work is good or not doesn’t even matter outside of its ability to force the worker into more time spent labouring. In these cases, creativity justifies bad work conditions and bad work conditions stifle creativity in return.

Rebecca Blake, the former Advocacy Liaison for the Graphic Artist Guild, a group established in 1967 to improve conditions for freelance graphic artists at all skill levels while raising standards for the entire industry, put her finger on one of the most important cultural piece of the puzzle when we met: “We have in the US this sort of cult of the individual [...] but designers and illustrators as individuals have no voice, but the creative workforce collectively has tremendous power.” Ironically, in the US, it’s in part the erosion of creative workers’ labour conditions that prevents them from organising around a labour union in the first place. Labour laws don’t easily allow freelancers to unionise and even if they did, the question would be: to bargain with whom? The list of their clients is virtually endless.

Moreover, since the 1980s the power and public perception of unions have dramatically declined in the US, and the creative industry (which loves celebrating exceptional individuals as models for success) also participates in erasing the collective nature of creatives’ reality. But successful creativity for individuals and great work are not antithetical to collective action. “If our members were regarded [...] as people who actually work and not people who [...] create pretty pictures and sit around daydreaming all day, if there were an understanding of the fact that we actually do labour, I think it would elevate the graphic arts,” Rebecca says.

While unionising is focused on large-scale improvements of industry labour issues, more local initiatives exist as well. Many independent studios resist the call for endless growth and try instead to offer an exciting incubator for healthier work practices and, so the argument goes, better creative work too. Some studios, like Marianek’s, are designed to prioritise partnership and long-term, non-adversarial relationships (with both clients and workers) by making sure to credit everyone for their work or by bringing people on early in projects as collaborators. Other studios take an even more direct approach, like Studio XXIX in New York, which practises profit-sharing, whereby they “pay out ​​all company profits to [their] employees at the end of the year [...] instead of just the people at the top.”

Illustrator Karlotta Freier recalls being mocked by her art school classmates for asking about how to make a living as an illustrator. “No one would make fun of a plumbing student for asking about the business side of things,” she says, “so why don’t I get to ask?” For decades, the promise of a creative career was the alleviation of the worst parts of capitalist labour. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” they said. But as Adam J. Kurtz pointed out, doing what we love without fair compensation and healthy work conditions only lead us to become ever more alienated, to blur the distinctions between personal and professional life, and to justify many sacrifices while leaving us unable to change things.

Maybe the answer is, as Karlotta says, to “just be a plumber!” After all, no one asks a plumber to constantly work overtime or to work for exposure. We’ve been told that doing “good work” will lead to economic success, but really, it might just be the other way around. With the help of large collective organising, worker-driven structures, and knowledge-sharing, we can accomplish better work conditions and more beautiful, more fulfilling creative work.