Why we do cultural work in spite of it all…

Essentially, „genuine“ autonomy can only be achieved here, in the context of cultural work, because autonomy is not just a condition of production, it is also the topic of cultural work, and at the same time its emancipatory and progressive content. Ever since the aesthetics of the ‘genius’ has emerged during the Sturm und Drang and the Romantic periods, this concept of autonomy has supposedly represented the essence of art. Therefore, art can never depend on external intentions and someone else’s desire to represent. Something is considered art only if it intends and represents exclusively through and for itself.
Art has to prove to us that this is the case by confronting us with pride to be independent from our viewing patterns, our expectations, our demands, unwieldy, uncompromising, and unconquerable; in such a way that art only complies with the standards it has set for itself. To the bourgeois society this freedom is the value that needs to be preserved and nurtured.
Both, the artwork and the occupations supporting and surrounding it – for example publishing, the gallery scene, or cultural journalism – profit from their aura of assisting this autonomy, supporting it and helping it to take on the sometimes unforgiving form of autonomous culture. While autonomous production conditions may become less probable and more heteronomous (i.e. more dependent of patronage and public funding) in the current environment, the desire to preserve an autonomous enclave in the heteronomous, money dominated and substantially alienated bourgeois middle class remains a powerful effect. The cultural sector is and will probably remain the only domain to actually – if only symbolically – represent this enclave, and that constitutes its appeal. The essentially negative aspects of cultural work – lack of social security, precarious working conditions, and meagre wages – are reinterpreted as a manifestation of the independence we want it to embody.
In this way we are able to follow our impulses to do what we find interesting and to like what we do while at the same time realising what constitutes us, the way in which we are special and different. Therefore, we are already privileged over those who (have to) make a living under the typical working conditions of late capitalism.

The autonomy we are thus given is a valid alternative plan to the alienation and heteronomy determining the day-to-day lives and jobs of most people. For that we are willing to put up with a highly fragmented life, with the patchwork identity that comes with cultural work. Since  only a tiny fraction of cultural workers are able to really focus on one thing, working in the cultural sector usually means to live at the intersection of many disparate occupations and roles, performed simultaneously. He or she does many things and most of them at once. For example administrative work for a cultural institution while at the same time writing journalistic reports and curating other artists – and along the way he or she will have to produce his or her own cultural content. All of these occupations ideally sustain each other and therefore depend on each other. So the prevalent autonomy is always merely a relative one.

All this sounds exhausting and stressful, and it usually is. Resilience still seems to be one of the key credentials a cultural worker should possess. Burn-outs are not unheard of. Working in the cultural field may mean 80 hour work weeks, 7 days a week. And yet this workload is not solely regarded in a negative way. Because it also seems to implicate the utopia of undivided non-alienating labour: an interesting and exciting life for those who are willing to pay the price of having to work under these conditions.

For numerous cultural workers a middle class employment routine, with its rigid and inflexible time management, constitutes a negative matrix of their own existence. We tend to think of it as being mindless and dull and not very fulfilling.

Günther Friesinger ( 2013): Why we do cultural work in spite of it all…. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 02 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/why-we-do-cultural-work-in-spite-of-it-all/