Gauguin died in a charity clinic on Tahiti, apparently due to poor treatment. He was broke and could not afford a proper hospital. While his work was selling relatively well in Paris, his dealer was not sending Gauguin’s share of the money. Rodchenko’s pension was stripped away after he was expelled from the artists’ union in the USSR. Mondrian died in poverty of pneumonia.
For the website of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), see →.
This point regarding Arendt is also discussed in my essay “Art without Work?”, e-flux journal 29 (November 2011). See →.
Quoted in James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). See →.
Ibid.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Little Old Women,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1982): 94.
This was recently pointed out to me by Shuddhabratha Sengupta.
T.J. Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): chapter 1.
Martha Rosler suggests that such attitudes toward professionalism were common among artists throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s as well.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. See →.
This was part of Walid Raad’s lecture performance at documenta (13). He got the figures from Artist Pension Trust.
What I am describing here is the dominant US and UK art school model, but there are other problems, and also other potentials, with nation-state type academies or pure neoliberal non-degree commercial “schools,” like the ones tacked on to museums and art spaces.
“… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845): chapter 1. See →.