The Passion Subsidy
Amanda Tobin Ripley
Most of us in the museum field are well acquainted with the idea of the “passion tax”––in practice, if not by name. Frequently applied to the nonprofit and caring sectors, the passion tax refers to the financial sacrifice that is extracted from workers who love the work they do. In essence, the passion tax describes “the expectation that [workers] should work for little to no pay because their passion is its own reward.”1 Sound familiar?
As a museum worker turned doctoral candidate, I am well-versed in passionate work. Yet as I’ve navigated the balance between the joys of a job that rarely feels like work and the pressures of a low salary amidst an increasingly expensive world, I’ve been frustrated with the internalized defeatism and persistent individualism of the so-called passion tax. So many of the solutions to passion-related burnout––offered by writers, consultants, and influencers aplenty2––constitute no more than a self-help approach to learning “how to say ‘no’” or “care less.” If only we could “care less” our way out of exploitation!
What we need instead is to claim a new metaphor: the passion subsidy. The passion subsidy is the collective financial contribution that we actively make to sustain museums through our undercompensated labor. The passion subsidy invokes the power of the collective to shift our perceptions and expectations of work. If changing discourse “holds the capacity to shape and reshape society itself,”3 the passion subsidy may help to both ideologically and affectively relocate the causes and potential solutions of exploitation in the museum sector. In drawing collective and critical attention to what it is, precisely, that we are subsidizing, we might also be able to shift the field towards greater social responsibility and institutional accountability.
Understanding Passion
Whether framed as a tax or a privilege,4 passionate work is a fundamental component of working life in the 21st century. Many scholars point to how late capitalism has blurred the boundaries between work and life, incentivizing people across sectors to find joy and purpose in increasingly all-consuming activities.5 Yet we must be clear on how and to what ends the discourse of passion functions. What is gained, and, more importantly, who gains, when passion is framed as something desirable in the workplace?6
Passionate work relies on the idea of potential future rewards. For Arts & Crafts socialist William Morris––“the nineteenth-century British patron saint of quality work”7––useful work encompasses hope for rest, hope of product, and hope of “pleasure in the work itself.”8 Morris’s emphasis on hope remains central to contemporary expressions of passionate work, in which “the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love”9 drives workers today to undertake unpaid or underpaid labor in hopes of future remuneration. In this way, as many emerging museum professionals discover, passionate work “glamorize[s] labor conditions that are far less remunerative and gratifying than hyped.”10
In looking to understand “passion exploitation,” scholars have investigated common justifications of exploitative managerial practices. The resulting discussion of “self-exploitation” stems from the sense that workers themselves are responsible for their own exploitation––that they “would have freely volunteered to do whatever extra work they were being asked to take on.”11 Passionate workers, by this logic, choose other kinds of rewards over a steady paycheck: enjoyment, prestige, the moral high ground of doing work that matters. This leads to a blame-the-victim ideology: “For the young woman fashion designer working eighteen-hour days and doing her own sewing to complete an order, ‘loving’ her work but self-exploiting, she only has herself to blame if things go wrong. After all, she opted for this kind of unstable career choice.”12 In focusing the blame on the individual’s choice to pursue a low-paying career or failure to rise through the ranks and achieve one of the few well-compensated positions in a museum, self-exploitation and passionate work obscure the role of institutions and systems in devaluing labor.13 Through this “ruse of neoliberal culture,”14 those who fail to make ends meet or become financially independent, who accrue insurmountable debt, and who are unable to maintain a healthy work-life balance suffer because of their personal choices, their lack of grit and self-discipline, and their lack of passion––not because of structural impediments and inequalities.
Passionate Work in Museums
Unfortunately for museum workers, nearly every account of passionate work draws upon the archetype of the starving artist as the quintessential example of the (self-)exploitation that derives from having a passion for one’s work. In the context of neoliberalism, its associated doctrines of individualism, the decline of unions, and the dissolution of work-life boundaries, almost all workers today must inhabit the starving (yet entrepreneurial) artist persona. Employment in a fractured gig economy increasingly relies on traits traditionally associated with artists: flexibility, intrinsic motivation, self-management, resourcefulness. The growing expectations of all workers to be as passionate as artists, to feel themselves “lucky enough” to get to do what they love, amount to a widespread deflation of labor value.
The starving artist archetype also converges with the low wages of a “pink-collar” museum sector with its predominantly female workforce.15 Scholar Angela McRobbie emphasizes the feminization of passion itself, in which a “highly normative femininity such as ‘girlish enthusiasm’ [...] can be construed as a willingness to work all hours for very little pay in the hope of gaining a foothold in the field of work.”16 Indeed, from the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist feminists noted “similarities between discourses concerning the artists’ supposed disinterestedness and the willful self-sacrifice attributed to housewives.”17 For Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, social reproduction labor (the labor of domestic work, sex work, and childcare) is intrinsically connected to notions of love, which takes the place of a wage.18 In the applications of Federici’s “labor of love” to the creative sector, “affect becomes a form of payback”19 in its rewards of passion and prestige.
Despite the fact that the majority of literature on passionate work utilizes the archetype of the artist, those of us working in museums can attest to the fact that “the sacrifices that artists have historically made in their devotion to their art are now expected of everyone who works in the cultural sector.”20 All museum workers have absorbed the “‘everything for art’ mentality,” in which “everything is allowed for the sake of art.”21 Art––and one’s love for it––becomes the validation of any number of workplace abuses or excessive demands: the all-nighters and dangerous practices required of the installation and curatorial teams in the days leading up to an exhibition opening;22 the willful ignorance of the important board member’s unethical personal or professional ties;23 the insistence that front-of-house workers return to work amid a global pandemic without providing personal protective equipment (PPE) or paid time off for vaccinations,24 all the while demanding the high levels of emotional labor required of customer service;25 the protection of the known sexual harasser on staff because the interns he targets come and go;26 the general “addict[ion] to underpaid and unpaid labor, enabling disproportionately high output while concealing true costs to workers and society.27 My list could go on and on.
Every horror described above and in the anonymous @ChangetheMuseum Instagram account has, without a doubt, been justified by someone in a position of power as a lamentable but necessary cost of ensuring the survival and flourishing of the museum’s exhibitions and programming. Museums certainly operate within challenging economic circumstances and within the context of omnipresent threats to arts funding; plus, an oversaturated workforce—with outsized demand for limited positions28—means there is always someone ready to replace anyone who reaches their limit and defects to another sector. It is hardly a surprise, then, that the recent Museums Moving Forward (MMF) report found that although “the overwhelming majority of art museum workers find a sense of meaning and purpose in their work, they are more dissatisfied with their jobs and workplaces when compared with US workers overall.”29
The Passion Subsidy
It is undeniable that passionate labor has been critical to the survival of the museum sector (and beyond). As artist and critic Hito Steyerl asserts, “this mess is kept afloat by the sheer dynamism of…[this] hive of affective labor.”30 I am not the first to use the language of subsidy in describing creative labor, though I aim to make its use more widespread. In 1961, while mediating a labor dispute at the Metropolitan Opera, Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg argued that the striking workers “subsidize the Met.”31 Art historian and former museum director John Wetenhall likens this subsidization to philanthropic giving, “where professionals endure early careers of unpaid internships and part-time work, often after years of post-graduate academic study, to achieve full-time salaries that pale in comparison to their peers in the for-profit world.”32 Artist and economist Hans Abbing describes “internal subsidization” as the practice of when “income from one activity is used to subsidize a loss-making activity within the same enterprise,”33 rampant among arts institutions. Danish artist Jens Haaning, who raised a media sensation with his piece Take the Money and Run in 2021, describes his actions as a natural response to an industry that asks people to “give money to go to work.”34 Meanwhile, art historian Nizan Shaked examines the economic system underpinning the museum, by which “public money for the arts serves private wealth accumulation and sustains the status quo”35 through the shadow state of philanthropic giving in the United States. To her analysis of the philanthropic underpinnings of museums, I add the subsidy of unpaid and underpaid passionate labor, raising the alarm regarding how this subsidizes hegemonic control and white supremacy.
History museum worker and scholar Amy Tyson takes a more optimistic view of what is at stake in sustaining museums, describing how “these labors of love also add value to our world by making it a more meaningful and fulfilling place for us all to live.”36 If museum workers and stakeholders agree with this characterization, then we must ask: how do we, as a field and as a society, recognize and value this subsidy? What if we harnessed this conceptualization to insist on worker tax breaks akin to those provided for philanthropic giving, to shift the subsidy from the shoulders of the workers to the realm of the government, which subsidizes so many other necessary and value-producing industries (not to mention many violent and destructive industries as well)? How does illuminating the darker side of the museum’s connection to the so-called “shadow state” encourage us to reframe or rethink our subsidization of museum functions and processes? What if the passion subsidy helped museum workers bargain for the kind of control that board members have, shifting the balance of power within institutions and realizing the museum’s potential to be a truly liberatory space for collective meaning-making and mutual purpose?
Collective Action and Mutualism
If the passion tax is an individual problem, the passion subsidy is a collective one. It is not one lone worker’s acceptance of low pay for the privilege of meaningful work that sustains the industry; it is the accumulation of masses of workers resigning themselves to the passion tax and dedicating more and more of themselves and their lives to their jobs. It follows, then, that the solution to the problem of passion exploitation is collective as well: we cannot simply rely on individual museum workers to set boundaries and care less so that eventually management gets the hint. We need collective action.
Academic research and critical theory have long despaired that artists and cultural workers are inherently unorganizable. The widespread and ruthless competition within the creative sector is often conceived of as a disciplining mechanism that impedes solidarity.37 Though the individualization of creative labor poses significant challenges to traditional labor organizing mechanisms, “wherever [creative and cognitive workers] have turned to union-based action, they have been surprised to find how quickly a common sense of purpose emerges.”38 This optimism resonates with my own experience and research,39 which differs so greatly from the general and pessimistic mindset that creative work is too individualized to find common purpose.40 In choosing to organize, through formal labor unions in an ongoing unionization wave41 as well as through “alt-labor” practices42 such as salary transparency campaigns,43 mutual aid drives,44 and mobilization against unpaid internships,45 museum workers are forging networks of solidarity and mutualism in stark contrast to these deeply ingrained doctrines of passionate individualism and competition. Solidarity––the antithesis of competition and that favorite mantra of the labor movement––is the emotion, praxis, and basic human instinct that drives communal survival.46 It is only collectively that we can meet the systemic challenges around labor practices, passion exploitation, and beyond that museums face.
Passion and Utopia
Shifting from a discourse of a passion tax to the conception of a passion subsidy is an inherently hopeful move. The very idea of passion contains “a utopian thread” in its “wholehearted attempt to make-over the world of work into something closer to a life of enthusiasm and enjoyment”;47 the problem, however, is the widespread co-optation of passion by employers and institutions. Yet a passion subsidy allows for the cultivation, and even celebration, of passion, which need not be discarded in the struggle to eradicate exploitation but can be seen instead “as a basic human right, or entitlement, of the workforce.”48 Workers can continue to pursue and cultivate passionate work, without accepting the associated tax, by instead demanding the remuneration, respect, and power that comes from collective subsidization of a vital sector. So let’s get to work––together.
Endnotes
[1] Jae Yun Kim, Troy H. Campbell, Steven Shepherd, and Aaron C. Kay, “Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, no. 1 (January 2020): 122, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000190.
[2] Zack Arnold, “Dear Hollywood: Loving What We Do Makes Us Easy to Exploit. Here’s Why,” Optimize Yourself, August 12, 2020, https://optimizeyourself.me/passion-tax/; Charity Becker, “What to Do about ‘Passion Tax’?” Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership, July 26, 2022, https://www.iecl.com/article/iecl-what-to-do-about-passion-tax; Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant), “If You Love Your Job, People Are More Willing to Ask You to Do Extra Work Unpaid—Even If It’s Demeaning and Not Part of Your Role—And to Sacrifice Sleep and Family Time. Managers: It’s Time to Stop Taking Advantage of Enthusiasm. End the Passion Tax,” Twitter, May 30, 2019, https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant/status/1134089887106457601; Brooke Le Poer Trench, “Are You Paying A ‘Passion Tax’ At Work? It Might Be Time to Care Less,” AllBright, July 8, 2021, https://www.allbrightcollective.com/edit/articles/are-you-paying-a-passion-tax-at-work-it-might-be-time-to-care-less.
[3] Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7.
[4] It’s fitting that the famous quote, “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” is attributed to Mark Twain, an arts worker himself.
[5] Laura Adler, “Choosing Bad Jobs: The Use of Nonstandard Work as a Commitment Device,” Work and Occupations 48, no. 2 (May 2021): 207–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888420949596; Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, and Stephanie Taylor, introduction to Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries, eds. Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, and Stephanie Taylor (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Danielle Child, Helena Reckitt, and Jenny Richards, “Labours of Love: A Conversation on Art, Gender and Social Reproduction,” Third Text 31, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 147–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1365492; Heejung Chung, The Flexibility Paradox: Why Flexible Working Leads to (Self-)Exploitation (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022); Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295036.2018.1433310; David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, “Toward a Political Economy of Labor in the Media Industries,” in The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, eds. Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 381–400; Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997); Renyi Hong, Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (New York: Polity Press, 2016); Teresa A. Sullivan, “Work, Overwork, and the Work of Randy Hodson,” in A Gedenkschrift to Randy Hodson: Working with Dignity, eds. Lisa A. Keister and Vincent J. Roscigno, Research in the Sociology of Work (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2016), 28; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[6] Hong, Passionate Work.
[7] Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 49.
[8] William Morris, Useful Work v. Useless Toil (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
[9] Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 5–6.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Kim et al., “Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation,” 123.
[12] McRobbie, Be Creative, 21.
[13] Kathryn Rende, K. Fromson, M.G. Jones, and M. Ennes, “The Privilege of Low Pay: Informal Educators’ Perspectives on Workforce Equity and Diversity,” Journal of Museum Education 46, no. 4 (2021): 430.
[14] Hong, Passionate Work, 17.
[15] Elisabeth Callihan and Kaywin Feldman, “Presence and Power: Beyond Feminism in Museums,” Journal of Museum Education 43, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 179–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2018.1486138; Dana Carlisle Kletchka, “Moralizing Influences: The Feminization of Art Museum Education,” in From Periphery to Center: Art Museum Education in the 21st Century, ed. Pat Villeneuve (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 2007), 74–79; Jane R. Glaser and Artemis A. Zenetou, Gender Perspectives: Essays on Women in Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb, Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979 (New York: Bloomsbury, 1981).
[16] McRobbie, Be Creative, 108.
[17] Jacopo Galimberti, Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988) (London: Verso, 2022), 275.
[18] Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism, Spectre (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2021), 19–20.
[19] Child et al., “Labours of Love,” 150.
[20] Ibid., 149.
[21] Hans Abbing, “Recommendations for Policy Makers,” in Are Artists Rich? The Value of Artistic Work: Working Conditions, Rights and Demands of Visual Artists in Europe (Berlin: Internationale Gesellschaft der Bildenden Künste, 2012), 22, https://www.igbk.de/images/projekt_areartistsrich/Handout-Are-Artist-Rich.pdf.
[22] Robin Pogrebin, “The New Museum Is World Class, but Many Find It a Tough Place to Work,” New York Times, October 5, 2020, Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/arts/the-new-museum-is-world-class-but-many-find-it-a-tough-place-to-work.html.
[23] Benjamin Sutton, “MoMA Trustee Leon Black Accused of Raping Teen with Autism at Jeffrey Epstein’s Mansion in New Lawsuit,” The Art Newspaper, July 28, 2023, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/07/28/museum-modern-art-trustee-leon-black-rape-allegations-autistic-teen.
[24] Marcus Dieterle, “The Pandemic Heightened Concerns for Many Baltimore Art Museum Workers. Now, They’re Unionizing,” Baltimore Fishbowl, October 15, 2021, http://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/the-pandemic-heightened-concerns-for-many-baltimore-art-museum-workers-now-theyre-unionizing/.
[25] Sara Bell, “‘You Can’t Eat Prestige’: The Impact of Unionization on Art Museum Workers’ Well-Being” (master’s thesis, University of Washington, 2021); Amy M. Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
[26] Change Berkshire Culture (@changeberkshireculture), “**TW: this story references predatory behavior and sexual assault.** I am another victim of the man everyone was warned about at MASS MoCA,” Instagram, September 29, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CUaVQilFbin/?hl=en.
[27] Michelle Moon, “Retooling for the Revolution: Framing the Future of Museum Management after COVID-19,” Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy 6, no. 2 (2020): 212.
[28] Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines.
[29] Jen Benoit-Bryan, Diane Jean-Mary, and Mia Locks, “Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums 2023 Report,” Museums Moving Forward, 2023, 1, https://museumsmovingforward.com/data-studies/2023.
[30] Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” in Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, eds. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, E-Flux Journal (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 38.
[31] Cited in John Wetenhall, “Counter-Institutions for Museum Compensation,” in For Love or Money: Confronting the State of Museum Salaries, eds. Dawn E. Salerno, Mark S. Gold, and Kristina L. Durocher (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc, 2019), 89.
[32] Wetenhall, “Counter-Institutions for Museum Compensation,” 89.
[33] Hans Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 86.
[34] Cited in Katja Praznik, Which Side Are You On? Ideas for Reaching Fair Working Conditions in the Arts (Brussels: IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, 2022), 7.
[35] Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 2.
[36] Tyson, The Wages of History, 5.
[37] McRobbie, Be Creative.
[38] Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It, 50–51.
[39] Amanda Tobin Ripley, “‘Not Just for Coal Miners’: Unionization in U.S. Art Museums,” Curator: The Museum Journal 66, no. 4 (2023): 609–27; Amanda Tobin Ripley, “Museum Unions and Social Change: Reopening with Solidarity,” Museological Review, no. 26 (2022): 147–58.
[40] McRobbie, Be Creative, 30.
[41] See Liz Levine and Amanda Tobin Ripley, “Art Museum Unions Index,” Museums Moving Forward, 2024, https://museumsmovingforward.com/research/projects/union-organizing/.
[42] Greig de Peuter and Nicole S. Cohen, “Emerging Labour Politics in Creative Industries,” in The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries, eds. Greig de Peuter and Nicole S. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2015), 305–18.
[43] Carolin M. Südkamp and Sarah E. Dempsey, “Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign,” Management Communication Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2015): 341–67; Elaine Velie, “Museums Must Post Salaries in Job Ads, Says US Museum Org,” Hyperallergic, August 22, 2022, http://hyperallergic.com/754852/museums-must-post-job-salaries-in-job-ads-says-us-museum-org/.
[44] Anniessa Antar, Alyssa Greenberg, Gwendolyn Fernandez, Hannah Heller, and Kate Swisher, “Mutual Aid and Organizing for Museum Workers in Crisis,” Viewfinder: Reflecting on Museum Education, no. 12 (September 2020), https://medium.com/viewfinder-reflecting-on-museum-education/mutual-aid-and-organizing-for-museum-workers-in-crisis-c91162eee6c5.
[45] Michelle Millar Fisher, “Culture Workers, Just Say No to All Unpaid Internships,” ARTnews, July 16, 2019, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/unpaid-interhips-art-museums-transparency-oped-12974/.
[46] Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, (Project Gutenberg, 2011), 56.
[47] McRobbie, Be Creative, 21.
[48] Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It, 47.
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