Art Labor - Cultural Workers and Precarity

When we say "art labor," the most significant event that should be emphasized is the explosion and transformations in cultural development that began with its powerful privatization. The culture industry is constantly branching out, and the number of people working in this industry is growing every day. The expected proportion of the working population filling areas such as media, publishing, communication, PR, marketing/branding, advertising, entertainment, sports, tourism, design, education, informatics, and telecommunications, when the entire service and finance sectors are added, has surpassed those in the developed comprehensive material production sector. The direct art-related networks of the culture sector, organized through museums, biennials, festivals, fairs, galleries, and auctions, are also becoming increasingly intricate and bloated. Among these, biennials, which emerge as the primary environments for the globalization of art, have been classified by precarity writers such as Paolo Virno and Pascal Gielen as the ideal model for post-Fordist, immaterial, precarious, and insecure labor regimes. Gielen even goes further, examining whether the entire "art environment is an ideal model for economic exploitation." In reality, aren't biennial artists, in a sense, considered workers in these highly autocratic environments organized under the patronage of global corporations?
(From the Promotional Bulletin)