Artist As Debtor | THE ARTIST AS DEBTOR

On Merit

Lise Soskolne // February 22, 2015 // 0 Comments

W.A.G.E. is an activist and advocacy organization currently focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by the non-profit arts organizations and institutions that subcontract artistic labor. W.A.G.E.’s myopic focus on artist fees has sometimes been the subject of criticism by those who would argue that artists have always been unpaid, or that the sum total of W.A.G.E.’s efforts will result only in minor increases in quality of life for a limited number of artists, and that these efforts are ultimately reformist and fail to deal with the super-structural problem of economic inequity [...]

Debt vs Political Agency

Noah Fischer // February 6, 2015 // 0 Comments

I’ll start by sharing how I came to organize this platform with Coco Fusco. I actually first met Coco while undergoing my own transformation into artist-debtor at Columbia University where she was a professor and I was getting an MFA. This is not to say that I regret the experience or feel cheated by it. However, it is remarkable to me how little I comprehended the intimate and long relationship with a financial institution I was entering into and how little this common reality was acknowledged among my peers at the time. I think most of us saw the loan as a good investment—letting our [...]