Listening to artists and writers talk, you notice that the word you are hearing most often, after I and but and the, and so on, is work. (The second most frequently used word is probably artist or writer.) Work is deployed as an objective noun (“[so and so has said this about] my work”) and equally often as a subject (“the work [does this]”), as a verb (“and what are you working on?”) and a participial adjective (“this part here seems just a little too worked”). Work is to artist as change is to candidate for office. You don’t detect this in the conversations of waiters, street cleaners, dentists, or even lawyers.
This ubiquity is mostly down to the multiple senses of the single word in English, which are divided among several different terms in other languages. There is work as employment generally, as place of employment, and daily duration of employment (“meet you after work”); there is work as labor or toil; and there is work as text, thing, consummated act, any kind of mediated expression.
Work as the fact of being employed, and the detailed sense of reality created by steady employment, is rather distant from the processes of artmaking in our diction. The artist of our imagining is found somewhere outside that world of affairs, irregular in his ways, unbound to boss or desk; and the sale of his art is in no necessary relation to the making of it, but instead floats above as a constant possibility or aspiration. The contemporary idea of art and artmaking dissolves the quasi-contractual terms of commission or a regime of patronage while preserving the economic status of the artist’s activity from total etherealization, a distinction in principle from, for example, a private system of aesthetic exchange among mandarins or connoisseurs, or high-brow hobbyism. The advance of this idea of artmaking as something other than ordinary employment but still self-sustaining, at least in theory—lifestyle might be the word that best captures the notion—is manifest in the number of people today who are able to think of themselves as artists even as they are engaged full-time in some other capacity to pay the bills. It is an oddity of our culture that the typical artist is functionally his own greatest buyer.
Thus the ease of being regarded as an artist and the autonomy it offers are offset by chronic instability and a certain nebulousness of identity. Am I an artist or an intern? A writer or a paralegal? For many reasons, the first sense of work does not imbue the speech in question here that often. On the occasions it is heard, it is usually inflected by some kind of irony, which can be taken as a natural reaction to shifting grounds, both semantic and economic—ironic detachment, ironic resentment, ironic relief.
The use of the word in the second sense is habitual but more involute. No one doubts the possible arduousness of making art or writing. Some artists follow very closely in appearance and activity those who simply work. They buy their dungarees at the same store as the electrician; they pick up supplies, just like the HVAC person; they tap at computers that a systems analyst would be happy with. Other artists use assembly lines, cranes, whirring bits of industrial machinery, in a throwback to the days when work was really work. There is a difference, though, isn’t there? There is a reason why the French say on travaille: literally, you torture yourself. That might be overstating it. As the proportion of the national workforce compacted in the construction, manufacturing, and extractive industries daily diminishes, work no longer exacts as heavy a toll from the body as in the past. But a crushing moral excise is still paid every week by the vast numbers of those who remain in the salariat, paid in boredom. The passage from taedium vitae to timor mortis is filled with work. Work, in this second sense, can be (and has been) defined as a painful thing you wouldn’t be doing if not for the money or some other, maybe social, obligation. But isn’t this exactly the reverse of how most, even a starving writer or a full-immersion actor, would describe the daily practice of making art, not to mention the original reasons behind it?
In citing his work, an artist or writer associates himself with the non-gratuitous, unpleasant labor, the “toil and trouble” identified by classical economics, that forms the ethical person (in this country, at least) and is one of the main modalities of social hygiene. The word is meant to act in part as a good luck charm to ward off the evil spirits of vacuity, uselessness, solipsism, self-indulgence, depravity. It can be more of a hex, though. Poets should dress like bankers, suggested Wallace Stevens, one of the few people who could ever follow this piece of advice and not feel like a fake. An artist talking about her gratuitous, autonomous, and abstract labor of love —her work—finds herself in a contradiction; there is some similarity here to the term Joy Division.
And yet when that artist finally succeeds in holding down a job at which an artistic posture can be maintained, more or less—working in the conventional, laborious sense, but still evidently as an artist—just at that moment, the locution work drops out and is replaced by teach. Two different kinds of substitution are discernible here. First, for its relative autonomy, its saturation in art, and so on, teaching is seen as close to artmaking where other jobs are distant, and hence as distinct from them. Moreover, in common with many, the artist wants her status specifically known by others. Thus, “I teach at Oceanic College,” or “I am on the faculty at Oceanic,” rather than “I work at Oceanic College,” or “I am employed by Oceanic College.” Second, the job of teaching is differentiated from the work of artmaking: teaching remains an auxiliary occupation. “I worked in the studio for a couple of hours, then I had to go and teach.”
So perhaps it is the artist who really works, while everyone else is wedged in an antinomy. No one doubts that people need to work—for subsistence, for status, for something to do—but does the work really need them? There is, to be sure, a significant and happy minority that loves its work. There are cleaners, analysts, professors, secretaries, welders, and nurse practitioners who exult in their daily tasks, who have not simply adjusted what they expect from life downwards to the extent that they are able to say they are passionate about their reports, their reviews, their shifts. Why not let them work alone? What our already enfeebled economy lost in weight, it would recover in radical innovation and efficiency. And then the rest could enjoy one another, delight in the natural world, exhibit the moments of their private lives on a website, or do whatever else seemed to them non-destructive and meaningful. In other words, they could all become artists.
There do exist, of course, novelists, painters, and sculptors who are not creating gratuitously, who are only in it to maximize their contribution to Gross Domestic Product. To whom we must first say: wrong industry. And then: wrong word. For these contributors to the arts and entertainment sector of the economy, cash value is paramount. They conflate the second and third senses of work in an effort to push back at the idea of art as a gratuity, to demonstrate the worth of their product. “I am working on a series of works…” You can see where they are coming from. The problem is that art has never fit comfortably into a labor theory of value, and for that matter, any notion of objective value finds few takers under a marginalist, net-income-extracting model of economy. If the exchange value and standing of an object of art are determined instead by the symbolic capital bestowed on it by an arbitrary, conspiratorial “artworld,” what relevance has the labor-time inputted? It is out of their hands. They would be better off with a word like collateralize.
There is one more nuance perceptible in the word work. Implicit in the phrase my life’s work, it is the sense that seems final and encompassing at first impression. The notion of vocation, with its attendant concepts of devotion and sacrifice, makes only cameo appearances in the average year, or even lifetime—in dark moments of the soul, in career counseling sessions, during adolescence, in cover letters and artist’s statements—but resonates dismally every time the word work is uttered. This is a vision of labor neither as some tedious means to a disjunct end, nor simply a form of self-gratification, but as a purpose in itself that is at once riveting and exhausting. It is the very opposite of work as so many know it—the opposite of the monotonous clicking and sipping, repetitive thoughts or movements, office intrigues and innuendoes, the hours of nothing—and, one would think, the antidote to bad novels and bad art.
But if that were strictly true, the world would still be nose deep in acknowledged classics of effort: earnest, meticulously crafted opera of sweat and tears, like the Georgics. No, the ubiquity of work ultimately masks the artist’s most complex and vital relationship, which is to leisure. The contradiction referenced above—that when an artist or writer is apparently doing nothing, she is in fact hard at work—is at the heart of the creative process in our time. All artists must spend a part of each day in some form of stupefaction, drowsing and dreaming, clicking and sipping, possessed by a dulled and receptive mood, in order to come to the summative reckoning with boredom, their own and that of their audience, that is the basis of most instances of high accomplishment. The integrity of a culture determines the greatness of character of its artists. This explains why the third most uttered word in artistic and writerly conversation as you overhear it these days is interesting.