Cirrus@Austlit

'The academic critique of the conditions of creative work has always been slightly disingenuous. In the name of a ‘workerist’ critique – one which highlights the poor returns to artists according to normative models of labour market analysis – the study of creative labour has de-emphasised the fact that the modern notion of ‘work’ is itself placed in question by artists. But the artistic critique of work, as Luc Boltanski an Eve Chiapello usefully describe it, has been central to the vocation of the artist since at least Industrial Modernity. Despite the rise of a commercial cultural economy in the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine an arts sector without the prolific moral economies which, although enabling of appropriation and exploitation due to the weak formalisation of exchange, sustain alternative models of value that contest the commodification of creative activity. Indeed, it is this critique that has in recent decades placed the artist at the avant-garde of discussions of changes to work in general.' (Introduction)