Author

Katja Praznik

Katja Praznik is associate professor at the University at Buffalo’s Arts Management Program/Department of Media Study. She is the author of Art Work: Invisible Labor and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), and The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016). Her research focuses on labour issues in the arts during the demise of the welfare-state regimes, and has been published in various academic journals, such as Social Text, Historical Materialism, and KPY Cultural Policy Yearbook, and in edited volumes. Before moving to the United States, she worked as a freelance cultural worker in the Slovenian independent art scene. She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Maska and was engaged in the struggles for improving working conditions of art workers at Društvo Asociacija.


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Zeitgeist

Wages for and against Art Work: On Economy, Autonomy, and the Future of Artistic Labour

In her article, Katja Praznik deconstructs the idea of artistic work as an expression of individual creativity independent from the economy and its processes. She demonstrates that this persistent ideology of autonomy of the arts contributes to the precarious position of artists and the exploitative working relations in the arts sector. Instead, she suggests to look at artistic work as labour, embedded in economy and subject to the economic relations. Taking inspiration from the arguments for the recognition of invisible labour put forward by Marxist feminists, Praznik calls for a demystification of creativity and supports the imperative of artistic remuneration, as a necessary step towards a broader goal of redefining value and labour in our society.

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