Creative Labor Requires Creative Conditions

This Friday, we’re hosting a symposium at the Doris Duke Foundation called “Creative Labor, Creative Conditions.” The occasion for this symposium is the announcement of the 2024 recipients of the Doris Duke Artist Award. Founded in 2012, the Doris Duke Artist Award recognizes outstanding performing artists in the disciplines of jazz, contemporary dance and theater and is the largest cash award exclusively dedicated to these disciplines in the U.S.

It might seem incongruous to mark a joyous celebration of exemplary creative contribution with something as dry sounding as a symposium. But this would be to miss the basic conceit of the Doris Duke Artist Award. The award is much more than a prize: it’s a critique of the prevailing attitude toward creative labor in the U.S.—an attitude that fails both artists and the wider society.

When the Doris Duke Artist Award was established, we felt it was critical that the award be unrestricted. This was done not only in support of creative independence but also out of recognition that creative production is a form of human labor power. As such, it requires—at minimum—a human being whose basic needs for health and sustenance are met.

Our society is sadly not unique in taking the “minimum” part all too seriously. Except for the rare few artists whose practices lend themselves to either popular entertainment or more stable labor arrangements (like a house symphony or a troupe), the performing arts are extraordinarily deinstitutionalized and atomistic. Artists often move from gig to gig. If they are lucky, they can patch together a series of residencies or perhaps catch on at a fine arts department at a university (where the pay isn’t good but at least there are health benefits).

The “starving artist” is not just a cultural trope, but a real description of the working conditions facing many in the performing arts. And the result is not just a performing arts sector whose principal laborers are often just a canceled gig away from crisis, but the rational decision by many other would-be artists to forgo creative careers.

In the face of these conditions, the Doris Duke Artist Award was borne of a subversive question: what would happen if performing artists were remunerated not just at the level of subsistence, but actually at the level of comfort? And what if, like “free” labor in other sectors, performing artists could apply their remuneration as they saw fit (rather than having revenues restricted to a particular artistic project)?

At inception, the award was set at $275,000 and, but for a small portion paid as an incentive to save for retirement, the funds were truly unrestricted. Some Doris Duke Artists did use the proceeds to support specific artistic endeavors. But many pursued quotidian comforts: a down payment on a home, travel, or just an income supplement that allowed them to put aside the necessary “side hustles” (artistic and not) that helped them stay afloat.

The results were extraordinary. The more than 100 Doris Duke Artists over the past decade are among the greatest living and most innovative performing artists. They have blazed new creative trails in their disciplines. They have inspired, captivated and challenged audiences all over the world. They have been feted with every major laurel, from Grammys, to Tonys, to Pulitzers.

Last year, in surveying the electrifying accomplishments of Doris Duke Artists, we decided to take this transgressive experiment a step further and doubled the award to $550,000 per artist. The goal of this shift was not just to improve the prospects of the handful of incredible artists chosen each year for this distinction—although we are proud and delighted by that impact. It’s to make the case louder and further that supporting the performing arts as labor has the power to unlock an exponentially greater level of creative abundance in our society.

This award isn’t only about the creative visionaries chosen each year. It’s about the workaday creatives who decide in middle school, in high school, in college or after graduating that there are just no real prospects in the arts.

The creativity that is stifled and exhausted when great artists struggle to persist is a venal sin. The mortal sin is the creativity that never comes to expressive fruition in those who abandon the arts out of socioeconomic necessity.

This is why we are marking the announcement of the newest Doris Duke Artists through a symposium. Because this is not an award that happens to intersect with a social argument about the necessity of the arts. Rather, this is a social argument about the necessity of the arts that is expressed through an award. In this respect, there could be no better commemoration of the new Doris Duke Artists than a powerful, provocative and candid discussion about the future of creative labor—as labor.

We at Doris Duke Foundation do not know precisely what the shape of a sustainable socioeconomic model for creative labor will look like, nor how exactly cultural policy can enact such a model. That’s the very discussion and debate we are hoping to incite, to stoke and to nurture.

Within this discussion, some fairly foundational questions strike me as unanswered.

How do we fund the performing arts in a way commensurate with their status as a public good?

“Public goods” in an economic sense are defined as those things that are non-rivalrous (mine having more doesn’t mean your having less) and non-excludable (you can’t be stopped from accessing them). They are the things we enjoy in common, like clean air and clean water. And this is often how we speak about the arts—as something to benefit all in open abundance.

Yet we fund the arts as a “club good,” which describes goods that are non-rivalrous but excludable. (Paying admission for a performance is excludability in action). This system never worked well for performing artists, who are always the first to get squeezed when performance margins are tight. In the wake of the pandemic, it no longer seems to be working for anyone.

Can the performing arts retain their creative independence as a public good?

The U.S. is marked by its almost religious devotion to particularity and localism—in the most extreme sense. We are a proudly regional country and our civil libertarian tradition regards individual freedom of conscience and expression (including artistic expression) as sacrosanct. At its worst, this creed justifies debased forms of domination, oppression, marginalization and discrimination on the basis of local mores ( “peculiar institutions,” old and new). At its best, this cultural outlook continually reignites the fires of social critique, insurgency, transgression and innovation.

By definition, public goods require public expenditure because there is no economic rent to induce private capital. Historically, however, greater public expenditure (whether formal government investment or wider but informal contributed revenue) has been at times inimical to artistic independence, riven as our public culture is with debates about what or whom art is for.

While European social democracies may seem like proof that these tensions can be easily reconciled, the presentation of the creative arts in such societies typically reflects their greater degree of relative ethnic, racial and cultural homogeneity.

Can deinstitutionalized labor negotiate with capital?

After decades of precipitous decline in membership and influence, organized labor is having a moment—and the creative arts are no exception. On the heels of the SAG-AFTRA strike, many believe the apogee of labor organizing is yet to come.

Yet Hollywood is among the most institutionalized of all creative labor classes, rivaled perhaps only by orchestras and skilled trades in performing arts venues.

No institutional technology that brings together diverse, unaffiliated performing artists in a way that yields meaningful market leverage has yet been invented, raising questions about how, exactly, the vast majority of creative labor can meaningfully advocate for itself.

These are just some of the questions I hope will be discussed and debated in this week’s symposium, alongside many other important issues about the future of the performing arts and artists.