Treatise Against Paying Artists a Living Wage
A Community Essay By Lauren Hlubny
Dedication
This is just my entry into the conversation—from my own experiences, from the editorial embrace of my Paris artistic partner (Kyra), with the help of DTS’s team and our current home at anti-capitalist space Haven Boxing, and from my deep interest in engaging with folks who agree and disagree and feel lukewarm.
Preamble: An Offering, Not a Solution
This isn’t everything. It’s a window, an escape hatch–or maybe a hand curled into a fist.
I reserve the right to admit mistakes and make amendments. This is not my attempt to bring any individual to judgment or justice. Any similarity to actual persons or actual events is for illustrative purposes. All humans will remain anonymous, as their independent life paths are their own.
And, if it isn’t your cup of tea, all the more reason to read it–so you can ask for more milk or sugar or herbal next time. I’m happy to grab a cup with you.
A Dying Wage
If we aren’t paying artists a living wage, we’re paying them a dying one.
Who decides who gets time to create?
Art sustains people. It lifts moods, shapes culture, heals trauma, and builds meaning. Yes, it also contributes economically—but those benefits rarely reach the people who make it. I acknowledge that much of society’s inequities are due to those in power making choices, and the mass media hailing certain art as valuable and jettisoning other art as worthless. We should be asking those in power what outcomes they value, because the way they measure worth is killing us.
The death of humanity—both spirit and body—is tied to the erasure of artists.
Some people will say this is a luxury problem. That we should be grateful to even do art while others are fighting to mine coal, or land a graveyard factory shift. But bruises and broken bones aren’t prerequisites for survival.
And just because someone else is drowning faster doesn’t mean we don’t all need air.
The Artist and the System
This isn’t about who deserves to live—it’s about who’s allowed to make art.
If more people were supported creatively, we’d solve problems faster. The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning prove that the challenges are becoming more and more creative—and the repetitive jobs less and less necessary for human hands.
So why are we still starving the people who keep culture alive?
Asking to be paid your worth is dangerous in almost every field. This isn’t just about artists—it’s about anyone whose labor isn’t easily measured. In creative work, the end product is the process, and it rarely looks like labor to outsiders. Artists, creatives in any field, seem suspect.
Who decides what counts as hard work?
Who Decides?
I have a degree in art, and my definition of what an ‘artist’ is feels ever-vague and ever-expanding. Art requires trial, error, and the courage to share results. It is like science. It shouldn’t be impossible to survive doing art.
In New York, artistic value is often tied to elite institutions like Columbia or Yale or NYU…as though artists are like any other profession and must have money or family lineage to count.
I can speak institutional language—but it feels like I’m suffocating when I do. I don’t want to betray what I’m trying to say, and yet if you don’t write in their words you’re not allowed to say anything.
You can’t make art without financial help if you want to survive.
Elite arts institutions, like many contemporary art museums or opera houses, struggle to support work by lesser-known artists because their donors will not see it as a safe investment—so that there is sustainability in the budget based on press and ticket sales. It’s how to stay in the black.
The same donors fund the same faces—and those who’ve never been invited in either give up or scrape by. The cycle continues.
Who gets to call themselves an artist?
Internalized Martyrdom
There’s vicious in-fighting between artists—bred by the pressure to survive on dying wages. In the arts, success isn’t linear—the top few get everything, and the rest are left scrambling.
According to the U.S. Census, the median income for ‘working artists’ in the US is $25,000—nearly 50% less than the median American worker.
I believed suffering made me real—and better art came from pain. The system taught me that. I thought the struggle was proof I was doing it right—because I had internalized that a ‘great story’ couldn’t come from stability. This internalized martyrdom benefits the system. If the artist perishes by choice, the system is absolved of guilt.
I sit here, typing this, because someone else believed I shouldn’t be paid a dying wage—and because I take antidepressants that I thought would kill my art.
Yes, artists choose this path—but not all the consequences. I have yet to meet an artist that was entirely unaware of the fact that being an artist would be hard, or possessed the true picture of just how hard it would be.
The Cost of Becoming
There are fewer and fewer opportunities for making art.
Economic power shapes our education. In mine, our final course taught us one thing: don’t be an artist. You pay for a degree, and at the finish line they tell you: your dreams are useless. Maybe plan weddings instead.
Social media is often cited as an independent means to artistic success. It’s built by people with enough time to program and post and it’s killing the people who create and consume it. Letting mass appeal dictate value won’t help humans evolve toward survival—and it won’t keep art alive. The art that questions systems rarely survives those systems.
Trapped by scarcity, artists frequently end up hurting each other. Survival often means tearing each other down.
You’re supposed to punch up. And yet, artists are held to higher standards than other professionals–an artist has to be a moral authority, a visionary, a fighter, and a healer all wrapped into one. For all that, they are given no material support.
The role of ‘collaborator’ is one of the most dangerous I’ve ever experienced. Artists form intense, emotionally intimate bonds—then cut ties the moment your presence threatens their progress. When you’re drowning, it’s hard to see others as human.
The distinct lack of resources leads to killing our artists from within the artistic community.
The Guru Myth
Whether within a certification, educational institution, or experiential training, speaking as a performing artist, there is an ever-pervasive ‘guru model’ that lends itself to questionable allegiances and further exploitation of eager minds.
You get ‘chosen’ as an artist with ‘potential’. Potential to make an impact on the history of the arts. Potential to survive. You feel special, someone uses you for your lack of cynicism, your fresh ideas, your deep heart, fast fingers and free labor.
Later, you’ll realize ‘potential’ actually meant hunger for acceptance and malleability. The ‘guru’ could be one person posing as a parent figure, or different people or institutions. The system itself breeds these broken relationships, because they are the only way for students or mentors to advance.
Your guru expects you to fly across the country on your own dime. Sleep on a couch. Lie to their husband while they cheat. Smile when they yell. Wait while they’re consistently two hours late to their own rehearsal. Your guru expects that the same husband doesn’t need dental care, as she keeps making unpaid art—and he loses his teeth, one by one.
They steal your ideas and write them as their own.
Or maybe, it’s ‘above board’ and you get hired as an artist’s assistant. They have genuine hopes of offloading one of the hundreds of tasks they have piled up. They swear they’ll pay you when their next check clears. Tomorrow, and tomorrow.
So artists can continue to work three jobs—without having the resources to say anything they mean to anyone who needs to hear it.
Silent Contracts
Artists rarely share how they actually make it work—especially not what they get paid. We don’t have a standard for what fair pay even looks like.
When you ask artists to share their contracts, oftentimes they balk at the notion—whether it be from embarrassment over their rate and terms, resistance to sharing a document sculpted through years of blood, sweat, and tears, or worry that their reputation might be tarnished due to an error. I’ve asked to see sample contracts—only to get suspicion or a blunt ‘no.’
I’ve been praised by people who touched me without permission when they invited me over to write late at night. Called brave and brilliant by directors who stole my work and erased my name from it. Criticized in public, groomed in private, and constantly felt that my creativity was the one thing I needed to protect at all costs.
But I’ve never been told by any of those people what any of it should look like in dollar signs. Just that I owed my everything to being an artist or that I should give up.
She’s So Heavy
The emotional labor artists carry—processing collective trauma—is heavier than most people realize.
Speaking from personal experience, building the worlds of these shows, from step 1 to step 5,000 is an incredible amount of emotional labor.
The need to have multiple jobs to make ends meet is what makes it impossible for artists to build a genuine community. Without community and conversation, the arts suffer. Kindness to collaborators is often what gets your project months behind schedule—and thousands of dollars over budget.
Suffering need not be a part of any story. Any argument that one needs to experience abuse to unpack perspectives on abuse is entirely false.
Yes, it is valuable to consult with individuals who have particular lived experiences.
But the weight of making art is not compensated. Suffering is the actual trope. The job of an artist is automatically associated with poverty. There are very few possible avenues for success, including: teaching, ‘selling out’ (defined as making less-innovative artistic work for mass production and the masses), and having family money.
Pins and Needles
Who raises the money for an art project?
The artists.
Artists raise money to pay others and often can’t afford to pay themselves at all.
Artists ask for money from non-artists, because other artists definitely have no money.
If you had money, would you rather donate to a neurosurgeon’s research or an art project?
I still don’t know how I’d answer that question. Even though I’ve met with a top neurosurgeon who told me that he might help people stay alive, but art gives people a reason to live.
Who decides what’s a necessity and what’s decoration?
The Future We’re Killing
Where does my own dance company, DTS, land in all of this?
Our current project, Shadowboxing in Blue, is our attempt to answer these questions in real time. With Haven Boxing Gym, we’re building a model that respects artists, athletes, and community members.
We offer free performances, free mental health workshops—and we pay our performers, even if we don’t pay ourselves. It’s not perfect, but it’s alive—breathing, punching, falling, getting hit in the head, getting up again—it’s proof that another way is possible.
How do we make it work?
My artistic partner and I both have jobs that are separate from our creative work.
We pay people with money we’ve raised. We pay our teammates 20/hr regardless of what their skillset is.
We crowdfund. A few donors believe in art’s power to change a moment—maybe even the future.
We barter if we have to, or we don’t do projects if we don’t have money.
Mixing Concrete
We beg people to come to our shows, not because we expect money from ticket sales but because we want to share the work so that it lives on.
We are always asking: how do we keep the model alive?
We have to pay the artists whose bodies carry the work.
How do we pay the people offstage whose brains do everything else?
We hire with anti-racist intent, but BIPOC artists are often priced out by the very system we’re trying to resist. Systemic racism has long shaped the economic conditions that kept BIPOC artists out—unpaid training time being one of many–and those conditions haven’t gone away.
We know our artistic community wants to uplift marginalized voices.
But not every artist is morally in alignment with the same thing, and who decides what is right?
An Offering, Not a Solution
So we’re back where we started. For ten years, I’ve loved making shows that circle back to their beginnings. You know—the trick where the end becomes the beginning, and the show never really stops. I still think it’s a little brilliant. Most things are circles.
It is my hope that we let artists live. So that they are able to answer these questions. Able to craft something with ample soul and food and time and care. Able to create, with time to study the past—and dream up a future. Able to work for a thriving wage. So artists can build worlds worth living in. Then the world itself has a chance at becoming more just.
Inside this crumbling system, Shadowboxing carves out moments where we can still breathe.
We can hold open a ring, a conversation, a place for people to witness that we’re still alive.
We’re still moving. Fighting. Refusing to die quietly.
How can we feed artists so they can feed everyone?
Why pay one person to express themselves through art and not pay a different person?
How do we measure the money going to artistic solutions, and not going to buy food for the hungry or houses for those without shelter or action against genocide?
Without art we have no reason to live, but how do we prove it?
All this while we are killing our artists.
We force them to destroy one another—and themselves.
We want them to die, but we don’t want their blood on our hands.
We want to die because we are scared of conscious living.
Wouldn’t we rather be guided by someone who was able to craft an experience that allowed us an entry into something new within ourselves? Within community? Within humanity? Within nature?
Artists are farmers of the soul. They grow what we need but they don’t eat.
If you needed any further proof that I’m an artist, I love implicating jellyfish in my work. Because of their fossils, there is evidence for a world pre-predation, a world where beings could exist by absorbing what they needed and releasing what they didn’t, without harm.
But this isn’t that world.
Seeing a new way forward is the only way for there to be a future.
We have to pay for artists’ survival so that everyone can live.
Excellent essay Lauren