Not just another Job. The Artist at Work.

What is artistic labour? This seminar addresses the question by examining the relationship between art and labour, offering students conceptual and critical tools to analyse how labour is disclosed, performed, and embodied in art. Through close readings of key theoretical texts and detailed studies of selected artistic practices from the 1970s to the present, the course examines art not only as a representation of work but as a form of labour in itself. Traditionally, work in art history has been treated as subject matter rather than as constitutive of artistic practice. The artist was imagined as autonomous and positioned outside the division of labour and capitalist valorisation - a figure of creative genius rather than a worker. From the 1970s onward, however, the dichotomy between art and labour, and between artist and worker, began to break down due to a paradigm shift in production and valorisation, mainly in Western industrialised countries. The industrial sector (once the model of production, now primarily outsourced to the Global South) gave way to the service sector and new ways of working. Labour increasingly took on performative, communicative, and creative dimensions. Qualities such as flexibility, autonomy, and creativity became central to capitalist production. The artist, as a creative subject, appeared as the avant-garde of a new class of precarious workers. “Be creative!” became the imperative of the post-Fordist era - a creativity aimed not at freedom but at surplus accumulation. Within this new convergence of art and labour, artists responded by identifying themselves as workers, forming alliances modelled on trade unions and critically examining their own conditions of production. Art was reclaimed as a heteronomous activity shaped by economic, political, social, gendered, and racial conditions, just as work in general is. If the post-Fordist era can still be said to be ongoing, its discursive centrality has nevertheless shifted. The indeterminacy of the creative subject no longer seems as functional to capitalist valorisation as it was in the early 2000s and 2010s. Today, there is a stronger sense of automation and systemic overdetermination driven by AI, platforms, and social media, alongside the increasing fragmentation of labour and subjectivities. How does this reshape the forms of labour that art embodies?The course consists of 7 three-hour sessions. After an introductory meeting, 6 sessions are organised into 3 thematic blocks. The first examines the historical shift from the art–labour dichotomy to their overlap in the transition from industrial to service societies, analysing artistic practices that critically reflect on their own production processes and social entanglements. The second block addresses artistic practice and reproductive labour from a feminist perspective, including debates on domestic and care work, affective labour, Autonomist Marxist feminism, critical race critiques, and contemporary theories of reproduction. The final block focuses on artificial intelligence and automation, exploring how digital technologies and platform economies transform work and artistic production today.