For 10 years W.A.G.E. has agitated around a single demand. We call for nonprofit art institutions to pay artists for the work they contract us to do. While our campaign could be summed up as an epic act of durational performance, it might likewise be written off as an inconsequential adjustment to an industry in need of total structural reform. It is neither, because W.A.G.E. is not an artwork and any truly inconsequential adjustment wouldn’t have taken a decade to make.
Our demand has never been for a wage – it has been for fees, and it follows in the tradition of artists organizing around remuneration for cultural work in the United States that dates back to the 1930s. We see the contemporary fight for non-wage compensation as part of a wider struggle by all gig workers who supply content without payment standards or an effective means to organize.
An artist fee is just a price for labor. It does not and cannot account for the time or materials involved in making art. We define it as the expected remuneration for an artist’s temporary transactional relationship with an institution to provide content. The fee is not for the work of producing content and it isn’t for the content itself – it is for its provision. It is for the work of working with an institution.
A W.A.G.E. fee is a price for labor that has been set by workers. We chose to set our own prices because there were none, and we introduced W.A.G.E. Certification as a tool that institutions could use to self-regulate because we work in an unregulated industry that works hard for deregulated capitalism.
It turns out that an industry organized around profiting from unpaid labor requires more than a certification program to keep it in line – it requires artists to mobilize together as a workforce. WAGENCY is how we propose to collectivize our leverage and self-organize around the demand to be paid. We built WAGENCY for artists who need to earn money in order to survive, and who refuse to support a multi-billion dollar industry through their exploitation by it.
WAGENCY is a transactional platform that facilitates the fair remuneration of artists' labor in the nonprofit sector. It supplies artists with digital tools and the necessary collective agency to negotiate W.A.G.E. fees or withhold content from institutions when they refuse to pay according to W.A.G.E. standards. Instead of a coordinated strike mechanism, WAGENCY enables a matrix of individual boycotts that can and will happen at any given time. It is decentralized, worker-driven, and designed to give artists of varying means maximum agency in altering the industry’s conditions of exchange.
W.A.G.E. agitates for the wholesale redistribution of resources within the art industry and proposes forms of union building based on individual self-organization grounded in collective struggle that must take place laterally across class.
Please note that we have made adjustments to the W.A.G.E. Fee Schedule impacting the price and definition of several public programming categories. Click here to read more.
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W.A.G.E. is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Danielson Foundation, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the 2018 W.A.G.E. Support System.
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A very special thank you to Daniel Sauter, as well as to Anthony Davies, Sage Donahue, Emma Hedditch, Victoria Ivanova, Suhail Malik, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr for their contributions to policy development, and to the many artists whose input has shaped and inspired WAGENCY over the years - you know who you are.
