25th Anniversary Reflections: The Paradox of Artistic Labor: An Interview with Katja Praznik, by Jasna Jasna Žmak, 2017
ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that advance our understanding of contemporary art from the region in a critical global perspective.
I found almost accidentally this interview with Slovenian sociologist and art theorist Katja Praznik by Jasna Jasna Žmak titled The Paradox of Artistic Labor. The piece was published in 2017, a year when I was teaching a course on Marxist cultural theories for the leftist Hungarian college TEK. I brought the interview to my course as a provocation. It draws a parallel between housework and artwork; in both cases, the cheapening of labor is justified by “love.” The provocation worked well and sparked one of the most intense and exciting debates during the course, where the audience – luckily already trained in Marxist feminist analysis – was both inspired and outraged by the comparison. In a nutshell, the provocation worked well because the interview was translated into Hungarian and published in the local left-wing online magazine Mérce. Since then, it has been a recurrent text in my classes that often is a kind of revelation for my students. 
However, Praznik’s comparison does not stop at theory. It also serves as a toolkit to analyze the solid historical material on the precarization of artistic labor in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslavia. This historical trajectory is just briefly mentioned in the interview, but it is more expanded in her 2021 book, Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (University of Toronto Press). Historically, her most central take is that the cheapening of artistic labor in Yugoslavia did not begin with the post-socialist transition, but rather much earlier, with the unfolding of the oil crisis in the 1970s.
From my perspective, the true value of Praznik’s interview extends well beyond the provocative comparison of housework and artwork. It serves as a critical lens through which we can examine cultural labor’s historical and systemic undervaluation. We can also work toward integrating art history and labor history through this device. While historically there have been some attempts to connect these seemingly distinct disciplines, this match is far from being done. In contrast with studies on popular culture, especially those that focus on its forms distributed through digital platforms, high culture is much less studied through the lenses of labor.
But why is this a problem? I believe that the lack of a labor history in art is much more than an academic blind spot. It is also directly connected to the unpaid or poorly paid labor of today’s artists and cultural workers, whose belief in the importance of working in the cultural sector at any price contributes to their acceptance of their terrible working conditions. Reading the interview with Praznik from a country – Hungary – where a museum or a library worker earns around 600-700 EUR while housing and food prices are skyrocketing carries two imperatives. First, we should demystify work in the arts; second, we – workers of culture – should organize ourselves. However, such self-organization can be only successful if we unlearn the myths of cultural work that justify the cheapening of our labor power.
The Paradox of Artistic Labor: An Interview with Katja Praznik
