For the purposes of our comparison, though, some points about the specific character of Melamed’s dispute are worth emphasizing. First of all, the issue did not arise at the point of the production of the artworks in question but rather from how they were circulated and sold. Second, the relationship between artist and gallery owner is explicitly conceived of, and even codified in law, as being akin to that between two business owners, with Melamed, as a producer, entering into a consignment agreement with the gallery to provide her with a service: marketing the work and brokering sales. Unlike in the case of a worker hired to produce an object for an employer, who can then sell the resulting product for whatever he deems necessary to turn a profit, Melamed’s grievance rests on a visual artist’s putative right to continue to have a say over the products of her labor, even when they are out of her hands.
The issue of visual artists’ rights over their works, even after sale, has been of historical importance, from the struggles over intellectual property that ignited the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York in the late 1960s35 to contemporary debates over whether artists deserve “resale royalties” for works sold on the secondary market.36 Yet—and here is the important point, since we are talking about art and class—this kind of intimate connection with the products of one’s labor is exactly what working-class people are denied by definition as a result of the quid pro quo that forms the central dynamic of a capitalist economy: trading your labor power for a wage. In fact, Marx’s description of working-class “alienation” reads as a direct reversal of the characteristics ascribed to artistic labor (that is, that it may be pursued for personal satisfaction as well as monetary reward, or that it reflects some personal vision or investment): “The worker . . . is only himself when he does not work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”37
Having looked at issues faced by visual artists, now let us consider some examples of disputes from another realm of the “creative economy” to see what the properly “alienated” form of creative labor looks like.
The production of software is one of the key examples offered by post- industrial theorists to prove that we have entered a new economy based on “immaterial labor”38; video gaming has grown to be the single largest arm of the entertainment world, surpassing the Hollywood giants that gave Adorno nightmares.39 Countless numbers of talented computer engineers are drawn into the orbit of the video game industry because of the cachet of working in a dynamic and creative field. In 2004, an anguished blog post by the anonymous fiancée of one engineer at Electronic Arts (EA)—a company that has become a Fortune 500 behemoth in part by cannibalizing scores of independent game studios—described labor conditions where seven-day workweeks had gone from being an exception, used during “crunch” periods when completing a game, to mandatory, with no comp time, sick days, or overtime being offered. Management hid behind an exemption to California labor law for skilled “specialty” workers; complaints about physical and mental exhaustion by programmers were met with the refrain, “If they don’t like it, they can work someplace else.” The anonymous “EA Spouse” concluded her blog post:
If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. “What’s your salary?” would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you’re doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it’s not just them you’re hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?
Right?40
The post touched off widespread outrage in the developer community and led to several successful class-action lawsuits. In one, EA programmer Leander Hasty (revealed to be the significant other of Erin Hoffman, also known as the “EA Spouse”) stated that while they are classified as skilled laborers, he and his fellow programmers “do not perform work that is original or creative and have no management responsibilities and are seldom allowed to use their own judgment.” In essence, for these computer programmers, the new creative economy had come to look very much like an old-fashioned Fordist assembly line, as one industry watcher put it.41
Another case: In 2012, a new push began to unionize the several hundred visual effects and animation artists at Sony Imageworks. A union drive had overwhelmingly been voted down almost a decade before, but in the interim benefits for the non-union animators had drastically eroded, even as the department became more central to Sony’s operations, churning out multiple blockbusters. “No one seemed to want to admit that those benefits could all be taken away at a moment’s notice,” the animators attempting to organize their workplace told one industry website, “and they all eventually were.”42 Company policy appeared to be to dodge, as much as possible, the burden of offering any serious retirement or health benefits, consigning workers to permanent freelance status.
When a website dedicated to female professionals wrote a particularly sycophantic profile of Sony executive Michelle Raimo Kouyate, stressing how she maintained great work-life balance (“don’t even try to tell Michelle that her rich home life—part of which unfolds at her family’s vacation home in West Africa—needs come at the expense of her career”43), an anonymous Imageworks employee offered an angry rejoinder on the union’s blog: “How do I care for my family without health insurance, sick days or vacation days while working mandatory twelve hour days, six days a week for months on end? Is the value of my children or even myself less than others?” For the author, the answer to ending this sorry state of affairs was the answer that working-class people have always turned to: “I think we can work towards all of these goals, by organizing.”44
EA computer programmers and Sony animators may not fit our stereotypical definition of what the “working class” looks like. Many differences separate the kind of labor they do from the textile workers of Marx’s day or the autoworkers of the 1930s. But their struggles have much more in common with these classical images of the “alienated” working class than they do with those of the contemporary artists represented in the W.A.G.E. survey. Both groups are subjected to plenty of indignity and injustice—but this doesn’t mean that the issues they face are the same, any more than apples and oranges are the same because they are both fruit.
“Cut Up into Two Persons”
“I think what’s confusing,” said Jennifer Dalton during that long-ago discussion of my Theses at Winkleman Gallery, “is that you say that artists are middle class, but we feel working class. We feel replaceable.”
The issue of class has moral overtones. If politicians endlessly pay homage to the “middle class” as a way of painting a magical picture of the American economy as an even playing field where we can all potentially realize ourselves, struggling artists may claim the idea of themselves as “working class” partly as a way of putting a name on their own embattled condition and piercing stereotypes that all artists are well-to-do dandies. As the example of Melamed shows, even successful artists routinely have to fight in order to claim what should be theirs. Even more importantly, inasmuch as the vast majority of contemporary artists do not actually make a living through their art but get by through a variety of other jobs, they are in actual fact members of the working class.
The theory that contemporary art is characteristically middle class may sound dismissive, as if it were a way of saying that artists’ grievances aren’t as significant as those faced by “real” workers. This is far from the case. It might be important to remember, therefore, that the reason Marxists look to the working class is not moral. Marx and Engels’s attachment to the working class was definitely not just a modified version of the biblical promise that “the meek shall inherit the Earth” or that “the last shall be first.”
Rather, it was their contention that the working class was exploited, but also uniquely positioned to be a revolutionary agent in a capitalist society. Capitalists had become the