Adrea Fraser
"A Museum is not a Business. It is Run in a Business-like Fashion", in: Nina Möntmann (Ed.), Art and its Institutions, London 2005.
Artists, project oriented and otherwise, no less than institutions, have come to see themselves as competing with commercial entertainment and commodity culture, from the explicit pursuit of celebrity to large-scale media events, to the small Internet art groups who have appropriated, ironically or not, the model of the corporate start up. The artistic appropriation of forms of representation, production, or organisation from the world of corporate and consumer culture may have begun as a critical strategy. For artists no less than for museums however, entering into competition with that culture implies not only the acceptance of but also an investment in the stakes offered up as legitimate and desirable by that culture.
Artists, like other arts professionals, are often highly entrepreneurial. I would go even further and say that we are the very model for labour in the new economy, a fact that's not an odd irony or quirk of fate but deeply rooted in our "habitus" - as Pierre Bourdieu calls the habits, dispositions and preferences generated within a given field. We're highly educated highly motivated 'self-starters' who believe that learning, is a continuous process. We're always ready for change and adapt to it quickly. We prefer freedom and flexibility to security. We don't want to punch a clock and tend to resist quantifying the value of our labour time. We don't know the meaning of 'overtime'. We're convinced that we work for ourselves and our own satisfaction even when we work for others. We tend to value non-material over material rewards, which we are willing to defer, even to posterity. While we may identify with social causes, we tend to come from backgrounds which discourage us from seeing ourselves as 'labour'. Finally, we're fiercely individualistic, which makes us difficult to organise and easy to exploit.