22/12/2020
"No, people don’t deserve to get paid for doing something they love . . . but they do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love."
"Art is work. The fact that people do it out of love, or self-expression, or political commitment, doesn’t make it any less so. Nor does the fact that it isn’t a job, a matter of formal employment. Chefs often do what they do out of love, but no one expects to eat for free. Civil rights lawyers do it from political commitment, but they are compensated for their time. Self-employment is still employment. Even if you don’t have a boss, and even if you do not hate it, it is work."
"If art is work, then artists are workers. Most people don’t like to hear this. Non-artists don’t, because it shatters their romantic ideas about the creative life. Artists don’t either, as people who have tried to organize them as workers have told me. They also buy into the myths; they also want to think they’re special. To be a worker is to be like everybody else."
"Yet to accept that art is work—in the specific sense that it deserves remuneration—can be a crucial act of self-empowerment, as well as of self-definition."
https://lithub.com/we-need-to-treat-artists-as-workers-not-decorations/
Yes, there is a union for artists, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
https://www.meaa.org/
