The expression is so common that we no longer hear it: working for the love of it. It literally means working for free. It describes with uncomfortable precision how a significant portion of the cultural sector is sustained, including the work of many foundations. I do not say this from the outside: I say it from within an organisation with a tight budget, which knows at close quarters the temptation to pay in experience, in curriculum, in visibility, when one cannot pay in money.

The data depicts a sector with a characteristic anomaly. It brings together extremely high levels of motivation—people who love what they do, who have studied for years to do it—upon labour structures of notable fragility: self-employment well above the average, intermittency, short-term projects, irregular income, and a normalisation of unpaid or poorly paid work that would be considered scandalous in almost any other sector. Unpaid internships are the usual gateway; the promise of payment in contacts is common currency.

What is interesting is the mechanism that justifies it, for it is subtle and functions very effectively. Vocation, passion, and love for the craft become the argument that legitimises the lack of remuneration. If you do what you love, what are you complaining about? If it also provides you with visibility, is that not already a form of payment? Several researchers have dismantled this logic with precise terminology: passionate labour that transfers all risk to the individual, aspirational labour oriented towards a future reward that rarely arrives, and free labour that is simultaneously voluntary and exploited. Passion, which should be a right, has become the tool used to cheapen the work of those who possess it.

And there is a filter that is almost never named. Unpaid work cannot be afforded by everyone equally. Those who have family support, savings, a home in a city with a cultural offering, or simply time, can string together unpaid internships and wait for the opportunity to arrive. Those who do not are left out, or enter under subordinate conditions. Thus, what appears to be a natural phase at the beginning of a career functions in reality as a mechanism of selection by social class: the cultural sector, which considers itself open and diverse, narrows in practice towards those who can afford to work for free. The diversity we proclaim is contradicted by the very door through which one enters.

Viewed through the vocabulary I have been using in other texts, unpaid cultural work is an extraction of future recognition. One accepts not being paid today because something is promised for tomorrow: visibility, contacts, portfolio, legitimacy, access. Sometimes the promise is fulfilled. Often it is not, and then what occurred was simply exploited labour. The boundary between a genuine opportunity and polite exploitation is thin, and it depends on whether that promise is ever translated into rights and remuneration.

Stating this from a foundation with limited resources compels me to honesty, not imposture. I do not pretend that paying well is easy when the money is not there; I know that it often is not. But it is one thing to be unable and another to normalise not paying as if it were part of the sector's charm. Naming the temptation is the first antidote to it. And there are decisions that are within our power even with a short budget: not calling what is work a collaboration, not selling visibility as if it were a salary, recognising and dignifying what cannot always be remunerated, and fighting to be able to remunerate it.

Because here is what I am concerned to defend: paying for cultural work, even if modestly, is not merely an economic issue. It is a way of affirming that such work has value. The sector defends its own value poorly when it accepts that it be done for free; every time it does so, it is telling the world that it can dispense with paying for it. Recognising that the love of art should not cost the livelihood of those who feel it is not asking for a privilege. It is, quite simply, treating culture as work. Which is what it is.

On open conversation

This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines with honesty, and from within, the real conditions of cultural work; here, how vocation is used to cheapen the work of those who possess it, and whom it leaves out. If anyone wishes to intervene from the sociology of work, the economics of culture, or the labour organisation of the sector, the notebook remains open.

Sources

Eurostat. Culture statistics — cultural employment. 2024 data.

Holt-White, Erica and Carl Cullinane. Unpaid and Underpaid Internships. Sutton Trust, 2025.

Brook, Orian, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor. Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries. 2018.

McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Polity, 2016.

Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love. Yale University Press, 2017.

Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”. Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000).