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October 13, 2019 marked 5 years since the launch of W.A.G.E. Certification, a national program that publicly recognizes those nonprofit art institutions demonstrating a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees that meet W.A.G.E.’s minimum standards of compensation.

With a total of $5,557,516 paid out to artists through 6,970 transactions, W.A.G.E. Certification had something to celebrate on its fifth birthday – so we commissioned a report to mark it.
 
Using tens of thousands of data points provided by W.A.G.E. Certified institutions and collected through 5 years of the program's administration, The Cornell University Survey Research Institute's analysis was informed by a set of questions posed by W.A.G.E. about how the redistribution of resources has impacted both artists and institutions, and how the model has worked for the complexity of the field. 
 
Now a tool, a service, and a coalition, W.A.G.E. Certification was initiated and developed by artists, and introduced in 2014 as both a labor campaign and a worker-driven experiment in institutional self-regulation. At its core is the assertion that artists function as contracted labor when we enter into temporary transactional relationships with institutions to provide content. It was an experiment because there was little evidence at the time to suggest that institutions would voluntarily commit to doing what was right according to standards they didn’t directly participate in developing.

5 years after the introduction of W.A.G.E. Certification, the report lays out the results of this experiment and affirms what W.A.G.E. hoped might be possible: that institutions can self-regulate, the field can self-organize, and that artists can and are starting to get paid for their labor.
 

READ THE REPORT


With a special thanks to Lubna Sharab for her work with the W◼A◼G◼E◼D◼A◼T◼A◼

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, Elyse and Lawrence B. Benenson, and the W.A.G.E. Support System.
 
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