I really enjoyed Megan Dunn’s Things I Learned at Art School. The book sent me on some memory-lane trips remembering how shitty it was to be a uni student. Not being able to afford decent food, being deeply insecure about your art practice or your body, and being able to remember in real time a good number of pop-culture references that only geriatric millennials or late Gen Xers might recognise. It had me thinking very deeply about my own time as a mature (at the ripe age of 25) student at Elam, circa 2010 to 2014.

Drinking nasty red wine from a mug one late night in the studio was a common occurence. Spending hours and hours on Candy Crush in the computer lab instead of reading Deleuze and Guattari. Living off 99c pasta and tinned tomatoes, with a block of cheese being a treat food at the supermarket. I don’t know how students go to bars now (or back then, for that matter), but I never had any money when I was studying. It was all about the preloading. I was my ‘normie’ friends’ poor friend. (Normie, maybe not such an affectionate term, but a distinction between someone who has a regular job or lifestyle and someone who is pursuing being an artist.)

Thank God for free wine at exhibition openings. I don’t even like wine all that much, but see me on a regular basis asking the person attending the bar to mix juice with my wine.

It was this dedication from Things I Learned at Art School that inspired me to finally read the book:

I became so fixated (or triggered lol) on this quote that this piece (initially a review) took a permanent tangent. Instead it’s an offloading about my value as an arts worker after art school. So just a warning, this is a rant about money and being an artist (etc), and student loans ruining my life…

I felt sick to my stomach the first time I got a student loan. I was 18, studying for a certificate at AUT to hopefully gain entrance into the communications degree (spoiler: I didn’t get in even though I passed said certificate lol). I wanted to be a writer! Lol. Anyway, that ick feeling is still lurking underneath some years later, ever present, but even more so now, as I have recently taken out another student loan. I’m studying design! Lol.

Now it’s 2023, and I’m a generic all-rounder arts worker. For better or worse, that includes curating, administration, marketing and communications, light Adobe use, arts writing, and maybe a small percentage of that work is art making as an artist. I’ve been doing it since 2012. I am one of the luckier ones, to still be working in this industry, but why don’t I feel lucky?

I entered into the arts thinking Great! I’ve found my people. They’ll have revolutionary ideas about labour and creativity. They don’t buy into capitalist ideas of productivity. Well, maybe it’s a surprise to no-one but I was wrong. Everyone is very intelligent, and very bright, and, the arts industry is like any other. It still wants to exploit your talents and underpay you. Actually, maybe the arts industry is even worse, because they pay less, generally speaking. They also expect you to be quite happy about it. It really says something about how much New Zealand values the arts.

Granted, it’s a hugely competitive underfunded industry. Creative New Zealand recently put out a report that stated $19,500 is the median income for creative professionals and $61,800 is the median income for New Zealanders earning a wage or salary. I don’t know any artists or creatives who make around $19K annually for their art, but even that is pitiful. Especially when the national average is in the $60K region. Vogels bread has gone over $5 at the supermarket now. Just so you know how dire the situation is.

With all that said, what other industry blatantly asks people repeatedly to work for free? I’m not talking hidden-labour styles, I’m talking really obviously free work. I can’t tell you the number of early-stage curators who have approached me about exhibiting, with no artist’s fee attached. Sometimes I’ll support, when I can (because I know they’re not making a dime), but it gets tiresome when your work is consistently unrecognised as work. It leads me to wonder why we (the industry) even have shows if we can’t afford to pay people. Please tell me it’s not just for community building and being inspirational. There’s something weirdly unethical about that, no?

I have no problem with people creating exhibitions that make us look at the world through a different lens, but please, I’ve done my fair share of free labour. I think I’d rather fade into obscurity than offer free work for a stranger in the name of exposure and networking.

In December 2022, I’d had at least four contract jobs throughout the year, including a permanent part-time job in fashion retail. I actually enjoy having a variety of multiple creative jobs and the thought of doing one thing for the rest of my life gives me genuine anxiety, but this gig life is gruelling; it’s not for everyone.  I would probably still pick this life over a non-arts job, but it remains that this line of work can be extremely exhausting and, most of the time, disheartening and rejecting.

I can’t tell you how many leads have fizzled out.

Many contractors will be familiar with not being paid in a timely manner. Deadlines are hard and fast when work is due, but not always when it comes to payment of invoices. The dread that comes over you when you are aware of the universal account pay-out date of the 20th but that because you got your invoice in later than the 20th, you will have to wait another month to be paid. I’m not a mathematician, but if arts are so crucial to the community, then why should it take over a month to pay out a fee that barely covers my weekly expenses? Why are there 500 forms to fill in? Is administrative labour taken out of the fee too?

I can’t even fathom a future where I am working in the arts and manage to pay off my massive student loan. In fact, it’d be as likely as winning the lottery. I don’t usually partake in the dream of winning the lottery, but I bought a $12 Powerball Triple Dip the other day because the jackpot was 32 million. I didn’t even get a bonus ticket. My mum often breaks down how she would split her winnings. I really hope my mum wins, because then she can pay off my student loan.

I don’t necessarily regret studying fine arts, but I am always left to daydream about the life I could’ve had if I’d studied business or law, or became a doctor (bold claim that I would be able to be a medical doctor lol)… would I have paid off my student loan by now? Would I be living it up in Portugal right now?

If you are not massively rich, living in Aotearoa is already hard. You will get every kinda fee slapped on you by the IRD if you use the wrong tax code. If you have a working partner while you’re on the unemployment benefit, you likely won’t even qualify for financial support. If you have more than one job–which is highly likely as an arts worker–more tax. I am not saying I’m anti-paying tax, but it feels very grim. It’s so difficult to just work in Aotearoa, let alone with little job security and the rising cost of food, transport, everything.

There is just this overarching knot in my stomach all of the time, much like in a non-arts job, but it’s somehow worse because we have all been trained to think we are so lucky to be working in jobs that we are passionate about, that we are consistently asked to settle for shit conditions. Unstable hours, check. Stressing about money, check. Not being able to buy a house or anything stabilising, check. I can’t even get a much-needed new phone lol. Suppose I should stop buying oat milk lattes every day. Feeling guilty about every single purchase you make? Such a treat.

And yet I still can’t think of anything else that I would be suitable for, employment wise. I wish I had the skills to be an influencer lol. I can’t even convince people to join Mubi using my link so I can get a free tote bag. (I only need four more people to sign up for a free trial period lol)

It’s just one thing after another. It’s so hard to live here in Aotearoa sometimes, especially if you are a contract worker, especially if you are an arts worker, especially if you have a vision for a better future work model where we aren’t just exhausted 24/7, giving everything of ourselves for an industry that often doesn’t care enough about us to pay us on time, or for some reason thinks that we can wait over a month to be paid less than a week’s living wage. Consider me fatigued!

I originally decided on this path because I thought being an artist meant I wouldn’t have to live the regular nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday business model. I thought that, of all the industries, even a notoriously underfunded one, it would be capable of revolutionising the conventional work model and traditional value systems that we currently have in place. (I am an Aquarius sun!)

We learned during lockdown that a lot of things are possible, like destabilising said work model and paying people to create crucial art, yet time and time again we are in this position of being exploited. I just wonder, why can’t we can’t collectively figure out how to do this better?

Header image by Natasha Matila-Smith