Can Artists Go on Strike?
Art is Not Leisure
According to the employment trends statistics of February 2025, the number of non-employed young people who are “just resting” exceeded 500,000. However, we know that time outside of counted working hours and days does not necessarily mean one is just resting. That time could have been spent on unpaid labor – for example, caregiving and housework – or on non-monetary exchanges of reputation, symbols, or mutual aid. It could have been time caught up in unexpected events that happened to oneself or loved ones, or anxious hours waiting through evaluations to prove the absence of income or inability to work, or the humiliating paperwork of bureaucratic petitions. It might have been time sunk in burnout that wrecked one’s body and mind, or time spent exploring contemporary philosophy in a library. Or perhaps it was proof of enduring continual self-renewal and lifelong education to maintain one’s employability – thereby demonstrating oneself to be a responsible citizen deserving of welfare benefits.
Behind the outward condition of “just resting” lies a temporal dynamic being exploited in different ways in both unemployment and employment. A typical wage worker maintains their livelihood by having most of their waking hours used up in exchange for pay. In the process, even outside hours spent on wage labor, the wage worker gradually comes to think according to the concepts and methods of waged work. As a result of this slow erosion, even their most deviant desires start to be prefigured in the most banal ways. They internalize a taboo against regarding others’ work as their own, and at the very moment they try to examine the hunger of their soul and the desolation inside, they must head back to work yet again. This cycle continues until they can no longer be used. Out of fear of the harsh chain reaction that would unfold the moment they cease being a wage worker, they grow grateful for what little they have and irreversibly compliant. For such a wage worker, a state of not working is “just resting.”
Within a framework that places rest in opposition to work, it is hard to even imagine the possibility of organizing individual time without regard to productivity. However, there is a population that disrupts the relationship between work and productivity: artists. In general, an artist’s work appears to be something done in free time or leisure time outside of labor. But if we assume that artist is a professional category, then obviously an artist is not spending leisure time—they are working. Whether it is a real job or a pseudo-job that merely playfully mimics productive activity without contributing to real production, the fact remains. Even generously wrapping that kind of work – which, despite not being subsumed under the logic of production, nonetheless demands so much work – in categories like “creative industries” or “cultural arts services” does not erase the difficulty that it still falls short of, or far exceeds, existing concepts of productive labor.
In the dichotomy between work and its opposite, the classical framework that idealizes art as if leisure life had reached its apex and thus become something resembling true production is evident in accounts from the past century, when the physical exhaustion and mental suffering caused by work were even more severe than now. “For many Marxists, artistic expression was a form of autonomous and natural production separate from wages or factory discipline. Therefore, art labor was thought to provide the proletariat with a unique path to reintegrate everyday life fragmented and objectified by commodity production.” This kind of description shows an old notion that views art labor as something fundamentally different from ordinary labor—for instance, as an activity not subordinated to physical necessity, even to the point of being considered true production¹.
Misconceptions about Artistic Production Persist
The form of labor presupposed by striking was a product of the era of industrial capitalism, and today it has become a privileged status to be exclusively guaranteed only to those who already have it, rather than a universally attainable goal. Therefore, in labor performed in the “third time” – where existing models of work cannot be applied – especially in the flexible labor of the so-called precariat, the form of the strike must be devised differently². In particular, we ask: How on earth can the work of an artist be struck—when on the surface it cannot be defined as a situation of exploitation or oppression, but rather appears to consist of activities done in one’s leisurely free time, and thus seems unlikely to be forced or alienated from the labor’s outcomes?
Imaginings about the work of artists are simultaneously encouraged to be the most systematically misconceived and the most unsystematically reproduced. The systematic misconception is an external condition surrounding the artist’s work: it is bolstered by a popular illusion that an art worker’s job is a natural activity in accord with their own essence, fundamentally different from the work of those who must toil reluctantly. What is reproduced unsystematically are the internal conditions the artist themselves hold regarding the work they perform: the variously-formed artistic subjectivity, and the series of artistic outputs they produce based on that sense of self.
First, consider the fact that because art-making is an activity driven by a spontaneous sense of calling, the resulting inability of art work to support one’s livelihood is not seen as a serious problem. This laissez-faire attitude is based on the stereotype that instability is, on the contrary, a sort of essential component of an artist’s subjectivity. The possibility of taking “artist” as a profession that produces tradable goods has, since long ago, been exhausted within a primitive understanding of “work that sells.” As a result, it has always been so and will continue to be so that the vast majority of artistic products, which will keep on being de-commodified, need not—and cannot—be post-factum calculated as contributing to the domestic economy in some way or comprising some percentage of national GDP. Interestingly, this distinguishes art labor from typical unpaid labor: many forms of unpaid work that had previously been done without fair compensation have, amid structural changes and digitalization, partially been converted into paid labor and thus at least somewhat reduced to economic metrics. In contrast, to this day and for the foreseeable future, it remains impracticable to accurately estimate the “non-market wealth” generated by art labor that has no chance of ever entering paid labor.
This situation ultimately makes it difficult to divide an artist’s work into blocked-off units of time and thereby to set a standard wage rate for that labor. In the paradigm of job fetishism—an inheritance from the industrial age—and the overrepresentation of waged labor through it, the wage worker is regarded as someone who can wield the so-called “freedom to work” as their weapon to negotiate compensation or at least exert collective pressure for adjustments in line with inflation. By contrast, artists find themselves in a socially, economically, and cognitively underdeveloped state in every aspect—from job security to institutional recognition by the state to economic reward. Artists have very low likelihood of benefiting from social security systems based on conventional employment contracts, especially severance pay or unemployment benefits, because such safety nets are designed on the premise of regular working hours. Most art labor, carried out in intermittent and irregular project-based units, clashes with the temporality of regular work; and it is also true that many of these artists operating as self-employed or freelancers without steady revenue have in fact willingly chosen to accept such vulnerability.
Meanwhile, the unsystematic reproduction of artist subjectivity relates to the inherent ways the identity of “artist” is constructed. It appears that nothing really restricts someone from identifying the self in which they invest most of their time and care as an artist. The paths to coming to regard one’s artistic activity as one’s most important work are not uniform. One may have arrived there via the inertia of a path from private art academies for college entry to institutional art schools, or perhaps as a result of finding a place to immerse in speculative experiments unconstrained by practical possibilities, or sometimes through involvement in Situationist practices of resistance. However, the fact that they find it difficult to calculate their artistic activities in monetary value only ever becomes a matter of concern at the very last moment—at the precise moment when there is nowhere left to retreat. All these difficulties persist in a cycle sustained by a variety of agential factors: the artist’s own anti-reductionist conviction that the work they are doing is not something that can be exchanged for money; the unspoken ethos among artists that “what we exchange is not something as petty as money”; the surplus labor continuously produced and renewed by that conviction and atmosphere; and the exploitation of that surplus labor by markets and state institutions that deliberately take advantage of it.
Art Labor Isn’t Even a Bullshit Job
Art labor is idealized as most radically exemplifying the state in which the link between livelihood and work is severed – the very condition that David Graeber described as essential for the end of “bullshit jobs”³. Yet as mentioned earlier, this idealization, which forms part of the external conditions surrounding art labor, can actually be an obstacle to declaring and visualizing art as labor. The fixed idea that an artist’s work, since it is not directly tied to wage labor, must follow purpose and calling – even if that notion is not true – functions as a potent fiction that serves as both the reason and the result of why artists cannot go on strike. Thus, while art labor has little chance of becoming meaningless work packaged as a formal job, it is difficult for it to even acquire the very status of a job, which is what enables the proliferation of both non-bullshit and bullshit jobs alike. In short, art labor is not a bullshit job, but neither is it standard employment to begin with – which makes it all the more difficult to directly apply to art labor the classic ideal of strike as a means of systemic transformation through a refusal to produce.
In 1866, the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) proposed the so-called “three eight-hour days,” proclaiming “We want to work eight hours, sleep eight hours, and have eight hours of free time.” One hundred and fifty years later, this “three eight-hour” framework continues to shape the general perception of work and leisure time. However, the division of work and leisure time that this proposal set out evolved in a direction guaranteeing the labor rights of a married male full-time worker who need not participate in domestic labor. Married men—who were the primary beneficiaries of labor rights—did not help with housework even when their free time was legally protected, because women’s housework was regarded not as arduous toil but as “free expression of femininity” deeply rooted in the “very essence of being a woman.” As a result, the eight hours of free time secured through struggle tended to guarantee male wage workers the freedom to do nothing during time outside work, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek analyze⁴. In other words, the very meaning of free time itself had been gendered⁴.
This exemplifies how today the systemic misrecognition of the dual feminization of labor—i.e. the increased participation of women in the workforce and the feminization of labor itself—contributes to mechanisms of exploitation. Women’s labor as such, and the feminization of labor in the third time, restructured work in relational, care-emphasized realms into forms that are even more flexible and difficult to visualize. However, because the many forms of unpaid labor women have carried out were essential for survival and social reproduction, the fact that such work was excluded from economic value could be sharpened into a clear political issue. In contrast, art labor has long been de-commodified in such a way that the very demand for fair compensation is itself avoided, based on a mythic belief in autonomy, creativity, or sense of calling. Whether it be the unit price widely accepted for gallery installation gigs or an artist fee for creative work, nothing is codified; this field has not even a “going rate.”
Above all, the most problematic aspect is that artistic activity follows a kind of anti-reproductive mechanism. Even if a collective petition demanding fair compensation in artistic activity were organized, the fact remains that in order to continue artistic activity, one must already have been continuing artistic activity. The target of the petition is in fact the condition for the petition’s possibility. This contradiction—leaving art labor mostly invisible in a state of dark productivity, only to hastily assume “business as usual” for art when needed—results in a makeshift, stop-gap approach. And no one remembers that contradiction, because it was all just a project, and will continue to be a project. As a result, the same situation repeats year after year.
The Loss of Opportunity Is Punishment
Contemporary art labor is captured in a form that Kuba Szreder has described, adapting the term precariat (the class of unstable workers), as the “projectariat.”⁵ The projectariat literally refers to a group of people who must continuously plan and carry out project after project in order to survive. The fact that it is “the sum of complex activities—finding opportunities, networking, proposing, writing applications, cultivating relationships, structuring, writing reports, and so on” is a dry description of the projectariat’s lifestyle⁶. Behind that lies the fact that complete reliance on interchangeable grants—something that poses a decisive obstacle to collectively forming the petitioning subjectivity—has become a breeding ground for opportunism and cynicism⁶. Internalizing opportunistic governance, the projectarian works not through force or legal means but on the basis of spontaneity and incentives⁷. With no strict working hours or rules to follow and no boss or authority figure, one might imagine that the proxy investors (judges) surrounding projects and the petitioner-investees (artists and art planners seeking investment) are free to work. But in reality, the structures of governance and supervision are diffusely internalized like capillaries, and this internalized control “uses tools like milestones, deadlines, application forms, and reports to snake through social networks, cunningly drawing on project workers’ desires and passions,” as one account puts it⁸.
An artist’s labor in a project-based practice resembles the precarious work of the precariat, but their discontinuous work cycle seems so intrinsic to artistic creation itself that it appears it simply could not have been otherwise. Herein lies the reason why it is difficult to define the artist’s mode of labor through paradigms of changing forms of work and industry. However, on careful reflection, just as offering housing subsidies to heterosexual married couples is tantamount to a kind of punishment for those living a single life, artists know better than anyone that gaining opportunities is less a reward and more that losing opportunities becomes in itself a punishment. For that reason, they cannot easily escape from such an exploitative structure. It’s not that they willingly do “application labor” (the work of applying for support)—rather, there is no other option but to go down that road. The biggest problem with application labor is that it is not real work but fake work, work for work’s sake (work for labour)⁹. Work for work’s sake has traditionally also occupied a de-commodified sphere, but the many kinds of unpaid and low-wage labor, including application labor, remain severely undervalued and persist because artists willingly and voluntarily perform them. This situation leads to surplus production and overproduction in art being accepted as the normal state of affairs.
Eligibility Criteria Are a Mode of Control
The Korea Artist Welfare Foundation’s Dispatch Artist Support Program, established in the wake of the death of scenario writer Kim Go-eun due to dire living hardships, is one of the foundation’s flagship projects that plays the most important role in preventing the institution from degenerating into a mere welfare agency. To be selected as a “welfare beneficiary” participating artist—qualified to engage in 180 hours of contracted service over six months—artists must rewrite their resumes and statements of purpose every year, starting with the ever-lengthening application procedure for artist certification. At this point, policy makers assume that these petitioning subjects seeking jobs—individuals who must continuously reconstruct and prove themselves to obtain approval and support for their artistic activities—have plenty of time to spare for such unpaid work, simply because they are not currently “employed”¹⁰.
Moreover, as more artists accumulate past participation in the program, it should be noted that in order to resolve the fairness issues arising from extra points given to experienced participants during selection, the program is now applying a contradictory standard akin to “experienced newcomers” to hopeful applicants. Lacking the realistic capacity to smoothly carry out the current year’s project is taken as a demerit, yet at the same time simply repeating methods used in the past is also taken as a demerit—producing a bizarre double bind. In this way, the system acts as a structured production line for forever-undeveloped amateur artists. It wants to identify the “needs” of businesses, yet simultaneously demands that artists not lose their artistic subjectivity and that they also not pursue that subjectivity too excessively.
Over the months consumed by application, screening, inflexible in-person interviews and presentations, the petitioning subject suffers schizophrenia amid such contradictory demands. Under the pretense of aiming to mass-produce the ideal “projectarian,” the process in reality proclaims only a phony flexibility that amounts to a low-quality temp position. This entire process, then, renders the petitioner’s time even more profoundly into garbage than the fixed-term contract jobs of ordinary arts and culture institutions that end contracts right before severance pay accrues. The unpaid labor of the petitioners—which will never be compensated—is transmuted into an outcome that maintains the institution’s reputation under the guise of retrospective laments about the program direction and the mantra of rigorous screening¹¹.
We have become unable to distinguish whether the contradictory desire to conceal the myth of the self-reliant artist subject has migrated onto institutions’ agendas of today, or conversely, whether it has been instilled into us. Institutions, in combining the model of creative grant programs with welfare-oriented programs into their agendas, aim to select exemplary “projectarians” to implement that agenda; yet in reality, they are equally ruled by the same contradictory desire rooted in the historical myth of the bohemian artist subjectivity—that is, the romantic notion of autonomy and instability as freely chosen by the artist.
Neither a Reserve Army nor Bohemian
The contradictory demands also relate to the fact that art workers do not fit neatly into the reserve army of labor (the unemployed and underemployed of capitalist society). First, it seems hard to claim that they, as people who could be thrown into the waged labor market at any time, put existing wage workers on edge. The reserve army of labor is assumed to be in a position to maintain low wage structures through implicit threat or to return to waged work when needed—an assumption premised on the idea that the unemployed in the reserve army are continuously attempting to enter wage labor and striving to remain employable. However, most artists, whether intentionally or unintentionally, avoid entering the wage labor system that creates fundamental temporal inequality; they have become accustomed to perceiving the resulting economic instability not as a threat but as a condition of living together. Unlike the reserve army of labor, which, from its unemployed state, threatens employed wage workers and helps keep wages low, dark productivity in art does not contribute to lowering the price of art labor or art costs—it only leads to price increases for a select few artists and the few works they produce¹².
The common ground of the dark art world—the so-called “dark artist village”—is not delineated on a physical plot of land, but is formed within a loosely knit network of a population that has adapted to such conditions. The bohemian tendencies of the artist community described above originate in a systemic manipulation—gaslighting them into focusing more on achieving symbolic capital that cannot be fully reduced to economic metrics, and on entry into art-world circulation, rather than on life cycles or material resources usually considered measures of achievement in society. The crux lies in appearing indifferent to such desires. Fifty-odd years ago, journalist Tom Wolfe described this as a kind of “mental two-tracking round trip.” “[…] Had they noticed (the ‘new style’ my friends and I are creating)? […] No matter how much he tries to convince himself that history is sure to record his achievements, deep down he knows he’s lying to himself. ‘Alright, goddammit! I want to be famous.’ […] What one knows in one’s heart and what one says are two different matters. But if anyone asks, you must never admit it!” he wrote¹³. Of course, those who harbor this “desire for absorption”¹⁴ would hesitate to define the activities they have been doing as labor, yet could even less bear someone else calling it a hobby or side gig.
Grants Are Loans Repaid in Kind
Meanwhile, in the case of creative grants (as opposed to welfare programs), it seems fitting to consider them in connection with the speculative nature of the contemporary economy. The opportunity we struggle to obtain through devalued unpaid labor and the further unremunerated work it promises is not compensation for that labor, but a kind of opportunity to incur debt. Here, “debt” does not mean the literal debt that was the biggest issue in movements like Occupy Museum and DebtFair (which arose from Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011) concerning the difficulty of continuing artistic work due to educational debt from art school. Those movements were inspired by protests calling for the cancellation of private-sector debt and solidarity among debtors; their justification lay in the fact that education—whose collateral was debt—should rightfully be considered a public good, and their collective pressure on the educational authorities (who had perpetrated something close to fraud via that education) did indeed bring about change.
However, the story that the grant-seeking subject in art gropes around in the dark for a chance to incur debt refers to debt in the sense of promising to repay the current grant with future value. In that sense, a grant is a kind of loan, and it is becoming so in increasingly profound ways. Those who decide whether or not to participate in this relay of belief that the promise will be fulfilled are the jurors of the art world—the evaluators who have successfully been hailed as “professional self-employed elite” at the upper strata of the art projectariat. They check whether there are any new “projects” to import, swiftly and early, from another “turn” taking place in the Anglosphere that they haven’t yet caught up with¹⁸. They then justify their selections with rationales like novelty or feasibility. But whatever rationale they give, these juror-projectarians have no need to be accountable for their choices. That is the nature of the project. Guy Standing wrote that the fact that tens of thousands of people must become petitioners to those in authority who themselves need not take responsibility is “a denial of republican freedom,” and perhaps that applies here¹⁹.
Meanwhile, small art organizations surviving on project grants undergo a head-on collision between the long-term, sustainable resilience aimed for by an institutional entity and the temporary, discontinuous cycle aimed for by projects. In the process, they lose their former critical potential and start behaving like quasi-institutions wielding symbolic power without legitimacy²⁰. Here, too, the logic of speculation persists. These grant-giving bodies favor promises of the future over past achievements. In reality, they operate like insolvent zombie start-ups, promising that the present debt (grant) will be rendered meaningless by a “higher future” absorbing it. Worse, these art start-ups cannot even declare bankruptcy or be sold off to exit. These artists, freelancers, and independent curators poured uncompensated and low-paid labor into a secret dream of enhancing their own visibility and symbolic capital, but the future promise beyond the current debt (the grant awarded / funds raised / investment secured) never arrives within the term. In truth, no one is interested in the content of that promise, and no system exists to monitor whether it was kept. In the end, the art start-up endlessly demands infinite passion and never gets to “exit” through any friendly acquisition²¹.
It is difficult to define this type of activity, which is neither geared toward earning money nor a restorative activity for bodies and minds exhausted from earning money, and at the same time it refuses to be defined. Thus, the life of the underground artist becomes unquantifiable dark matter, never reduced to any meaningful statistic or economic indicator. Though immeasurable, it nevertheless functions as a necessarily consumed and expected presence within the art world and creative industry structure. In that sense, the “artistic dark matter” —which exists in the art-world galaxy yet remains undetectable—is built precisely upon this time²². According to Gregory Sholette, artistic dark matter is a necessary condition for the operation of the current art world: “the art industry must ghettoize the majority of qualified participants in order to generate artistic value”²². Borrowing Sholette’s metaphor, Kuba Szreder explains the economy of artistic visibility in more concrete terms: “Artistic dark matter sustains the gravity of the art world by enrolling in art schools, purchasing art materials, spreading reputations, chasing exhibitions, maintaining infrastructure, and creating and transmitting artistic jargon. These activities are not exploited in the manner of wage labor, but the value produced by them is captured or trawled, and the haul is converted into capital privatized by those with the power to claim its results as their own.”²³
Resistance Art and Art Strikes Are Not the Same
The J20 Art Strike was a kind of art strike in which, on January 20, 2017—the day of Trump’s inauguration—galleries, museums, and art institutions collectively closed, issuing a declaration that instead of producing politically messaged art, they would halt the very production of art itself. In that it engineered stoppage as a political act, this event took on the form of a strike in the classic sense, demonstrating that if an organization or affiliation and contractual relationships exist, it is at least formally possible to emulate the form of a strike²⁴. However, while those affiliated with institutional organizations or agencies in regular or contractual relationships can assert their own stoppage in that way, for the vast majority of art workers, who can never be quantitatively tallied or estimated, such a stoppage is a condition that, chosen or not, is already given. Such over-representation occurs everywhere. For instance, ceasing to produce art works, canceling exhibitions or performances, or abandoning one’s self-definition as an artist—these kinds of stoppages are already part of the fabric of our lives. But those stoppages are a standstill given to us without our choosing, isolated from the catalysts and cycles in which we had wished to be involved. In other words, stoppage is no longer a matter of declaration—it is an already existing reality. It is true that a strike must be named and organized to acquire political meaning, but bereft of such organized language and structure, we are already on strike.
An art strike might easily be confused with simply “quitting” due to practical constraints or the exhaustion of sources of inspiration. However, this essay seeks to ask what exactly it is that we truly wish to refuse through a strike. Moreover, this is in the context of contemporary artistic work already consisting of various forms of refusal: for example, refusals of colonial, racist, patriarchal power relations, and refusals of neoliberal competitive structures. If such noncompliance was originally an important axis of contemporary art labor, then in effect we are already on strike. Strike has been our work all along—albeit we’ve never really had a proper job to strike from. Such artistic practices have continually manifested in the form of resistance, and this strike-like art has aimed to introduce a stoppage into the “business as usual” state of the world. Therefore, the one thing an artist could never strike from may be the introduction of stoppage itself. In that case, is what remains for us a strike against the strike? In my view, only when more statements are made about how we are interrupted and stuck in stalemate can we be connected and start right there. For the fruition of a “project” called strike—one that cannot be “project-managed” according to milestones, and for which drafting “expected outcomes” is impossible—with whom must we join hands?
Contribution to <Dentalkritic> (2025, Towels and Wreaths)
Endnotes
1. Gregory Sholette (2011). Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Pluto Press. pp.146–8.
2. On the “third time,” see Guy Standing (2023). The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Penguin Books. Chapter 4.
3. David Graeber (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster.
4. Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek (2023). After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. London: Verso. From p.115.
5. Kuba Szreder (2021). The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World. Manchester University Press.
6. Szreder, ibid., “P for Projectariat,” pp.194–7.
7. Isabelle Bruno, “Governing Social Creativity Through Benchmarking.” In Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, edited by Michał Kozłowski, Krystian Szadkowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, and Kuba Szreder, pp.143–57. London: MayFly Books, 2014. (Requoted from p.114 of the above work.)
8. Szreder, ibid., “C for Control,” p.58.
9. The UK’s Universal Credit system has become notorious as a repressive governing measure: it imposes mandatory work-for-labour training and other obligations on the unemployed, with benefit withdrawal procedures tantamount to punishment for non-compliance. See Guy Standing, The Politics of Time, from p.253.
10. The point about policy makers’ flawed assumption is drawn from Guy Standing, The Politics of Time.
11. If these institutions truly want “fairness” from a welfare perspective, it would actually be more equitable to select participants by applying a median income criterion, as is done in the current grant system.
12. Sholette, ibid., p.120.
13. Tom Wolfe (1975). The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp.20–5.
14. Excerpted from Pierre-Yves Gomez, Speculative Capitalism: Will the Promise of Growth Continue? (trans. Jin-sik Kim, Minumsa, 2024). The term “absorption” is the author’s term for the speculative belief that the current debt will be rendered meaningless by the asset value that will multiply in the future.
15. This refers to a debtor extinguishing an obligation by offering a different performance than originally owed. In other words, repaying a debt with some other property or asset instead of money.
16. Examples of strikes in contemporary art were referenced in Kuba Szreder, ibid. (see entry “P for Productive Withdrawal”). For more examples, see Sholette, ibid., Chapters 6 and 7.
17. Hakhoe-jwi (2022). “LXXV. Open Universe / Future Art.” (Refer to this source for further context.)
18. Szreder, ibid., “T for Turns, or on the Vicious Cycle,” see p.229ff.
19. Guy Standing, ibid., p.254.
20. Ulf Wuggenig, Gerald Raunig, and Gene Ray, eds. (2011). Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’. London: MayFly Books. (Requoted from p.116 of the above work by Kuba Szreder.)
21. “Exit” refers to an exit strategy in which startup founders and investors recover their investment or realize profits. In other words, through various means such as an initial public offering (IPO) or merger & acquisition (M&A), early-stage investors recoup their capital or founders sell the company to make a return.
22. Sholette, ibid., p.120.
23. Szreder, ibid., p.78. (See entry “D for Dark Matter.”)
24. For additional information, see: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/168899/productive-withdrawals-art-strikes-art-worlds-and-art-as-a-practice-of-freedom/