Speaking of the Sydney Art Seen Society, they too have a web site and it chronicles their efforts in demanding (in a polite way) set fees for artists included in every public gallery exhibition in the country, $500 for an artist in a group show and $2000 in a solo gig. We don’t really understand how SASS came up with those figures, but we are definitely of the opinion that to receive, one must ask.
SASS has been pretty successful getting press coverage for their activities and their site posts stories from The Australian on their meetings and events. Kate Lundy, the shadow minister for the arts, helped the SASS cause by attending their meeting at the Australia Council and by provided a sound bite to ABC radio who attended the meeting. As The Australian reported:
“Lundy said the FTA represents ‘one of the greatest threats to Australia’s cultural capacity’, a position held by many local artists, who object to culture being included in the agreement. Repeated in a radio interview on Tuesday morning, her comments were seen by some as fracturing the ALP’s position on the agreement, although Labor leader Mark Latham insisted that Lundy was raising “items of public concern” rather than breaking ranks. He said Labor would decide its position once it had all the facts.”
John Howard and Alexander Downer seized on Lundy’s statement as evidence that the Labor Party was “splitting down the middle” diverting the story away from the SASS event and its petition. Still, The Australian must be congratulated for widening the debate away from a simple demand into the complexities of what such a set fee would mean:
“Payment of set artist fees used to be a prerequisite of funding through the Australia Council, but the scheme was scrapped in 1997 because it was seen as inflexible. Galleries now decide what fees are appropriate, with the result that some pay good fees and others little or nothing at all. […]
“The National Association for the Visual Arts – whose voluntary code of practice contains a schedule of recommended artist fees – supports the petition. Gallery directors contacted by The Australian support the concept of artist fees.
But the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art’s director Sarah Miller warns that standardising fees nationally could put undue pressure on galleries outside Sydney.
She also wonders why the petition is limited to galleries that are federally funded, ignoring the galleries most likely to be in a position to pay: the big state-funded capital-city galleries, artist-run spaces, universities and festivals.
‘There is absolutely the will to [pay a substantial fee], but the capacity is another matter,’ she says.”
As much as we agree with the sentiment that artists should be paid for their efforts, we also can’t escape the thought that the whole exercise is somewhat futile. Attaching a set figure to an artist’s participation is tokenistic, no matter how appealing certain sums appear. More problematic is changing the way an artist is paid for their work. Being selected for a solo or group show and attracting a set fee for that participation is akin to a service fee where a participant is rewarded for their efforts by an industry-wide agreement on the value for that service.
Artists and their work, by the very nature of the activity, usually operate outside the payment-for-service arrangement you would have for say, trades people like plumbers and electricians. After all, they are providing their skills for a fee in much the same way artists would under SASS’s proposal. The difference is that in a competitive market place, plumbers and electricians can attempt to undercut their competitors by offering a cheaper service and thus attract more work. If public galleries started paying artist for their participation, why wouldn’t an artist be able to offer their services for a cheaper rate to get into a group show? As a government mandated payment, there would be a good argument that such a payment would be anti-competitive.
Perhaps a more suitable analogy to what the artists are asking for is the music industry – after all, individual musicians are rewarded for the popularity of their work and are supported by advance payments on the potential of their salability before they even get to the market place. Organisations like VisCopy who collect royalties for the reproduction of artists work in magazines have a direct equivalent in music industry organisations like AMCOS (mechanical rights) and APRA (performance royalties) who police the reproduction of musicians work. Musicians also have the advantage of massive multinational entertainment corporations looking out for their interests from distribution right down to busting copyright infringers. Naturally, visual artists wouldn’t want those kinds of organisations to run the art world, preferring instead a more low key approach that would ensure artists rewards for their efforts. Or would they?
At the first SASS meeting the even more vexatious question of a living wage for artists was brought up. For those among us old enough, it is surely a case of “here we go again” with flash backs to the Artworkers Union. Placing a value on artist’s worth, despite the fact that so many artists live close to the official poverty line, goes against the whole ethos of what art is, a commodity that is valued by its scarcity and not on its material value. Artists are by their very nature capitalists, offering their work to a market place that decides which of the art works are the most valuable and then, if enough people agree, the value of those objects increases. The artists can benefit directly and (albeit with a few intermediary steps) reap the market’s rewards.
But to value an artist’s activity by a government mandated payment derails the whole ethos of the art market and, if values are set in advance of the artist’s work ever reaching the market place, then how would artists hope to benefit in the future if their work proves to be popular? We can well imagine that once an artist’s wage is set, a pension plan can’t be too far behind.
