Art initiative CASE: Artists should be able to make a living from their work

IIn October 2021 there was a group exhibition in the Barbara Weiß gallery in Berlin-Kreuzberg. It was called Stars Down to Earth and, as is often the case with group shows, it featured work by artists at very different points in their careers. An A4 sheet of paper hung in a corner, smoothly framed. It could almost have been taken for the house rules, and in the broadest sense it was. What was there was an appeal, a call for help, an appeal: how to do things better in a market that only knows winners and losers, but which actually lives from everything in between.

On the plain sheet, typed with a typewriter, was the suggestion that five percent of all gallery income and five percent of artist income should be lumped together and this ten percent divided among all artists participating in the exhibition. Because the value of art is not only expressed in how much someone is willing to pay for it, and because the “art” system has to be thought of in more solidarity if it is to continue to exist in all its diversity.

Artists should be able to make a living from their work

The paper said: “With the increasing privatization of the art world and an individualized perspective of success where winners and losers are clearly defined in financial terms, we believe that more collective and responsible economic models need to be proposed (…) There are clear economic barriers preventing access to the art world, and class accessibility issues exist across the industry.”

What sounds a bit convoluted means that even those artists whose work isn’t selling well – because it’s not as established yet or because the nature of their work makes it harder to sell (conceptual art, video work, performance) – also have the opportunity should live from their work. In the proposal, however, a fundamental problem of the art business is named: the more difficult access conditions that result from the poor pay. Not only from artists, but also from curators, employees in galleries and museums and supervisory staff. This is what is meant by the “questions about the accessibility of classes (…) throughout the industry”. A cultural establishment that presupposes that you don’t have to earn your living with work, but are cross-financed by rich parents or partners, will only produce a very monotonous culture that is dominated by a white upper middle class.

The proposal was signed by the Berlin artist Sung Tieu, the Studio for Propositional Cinema and the curator Nicholas Tammens. The project is called CASE: Communal Artist Sharing Economy. In addition to proposing a fair share of some revenue from group exhibitions, they are also working on an open source platform where anyone can participate to invent new systems that bypass the classic order of the art market. Ideally, galleries are listed there that already operate in this way or are ready to deal with a new model.

In addition, questions should be clarified there that younger artists in particular often do not ask. For example: How much fee can you ask for? How much effort is expected from the gallery? How does a gallery participate in a new production? All questions that one does not tend to ask oneself as a viewer of art and that probably also seem irrelevant. Their clarification decides what kind of art will be produced in the future and thus be seen.

Who owns what, why and where does the money actually come from?

Because if only artists who sell well were visible, there would soon only be Jeff Koons’ shimmering “Balloon Dogs” that can fetch $50 million at auction. Such art as that of Maria Eichhorn, for example, would then be seen less or not at all. Eichhorn, which is represented by the Barbara Weiß Gallery mentioned above, was featured in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. In doing so, she revealed the layers and thus the history of the building. For the Documenta 14 in Athens she bought a house with her production budget with the aim that it does not belong to anyone, which is bureaucratically impossible.