The expression is so commonplace that it has become almost imperceptible: working for the love of art. It signifies, quite literally, working for nothing. It describes with uncomfortable precision how a significant portion of the cultural sector is sustained, including the work of many foundations. I speak from the perspective of an organisation with a constrained budget, one that is intimately familiar with the temptation to pay in experience, in curriculum vitae, in visibility, when one cannot pay in currency.
The data delineate a sector with a characteristic anomaly. It brings together exceptionally high levels of motivation—individuals who love their craft, who have dedicated years to its pursuit—within labour structures of notable fragility: self-employment significantly above the average, intermittency, short-term projects, irregular income, and a normalisation of unpaid or underpaid labour that would be considered scandalous in almost any other sector. Unpaid internships are the customary point of entry; the promise of payment in contacts is common currency.
The mechanism that justifies this is subtle and functions with great efficacy. Vocation, passion, and love for the craft legitimise the absence of remuneration. If one pursues what one loves, of what is there to complain? If it also provides visibility, is that not a form of payment in itself? Various researchers have dismantled this logic with precise terminology: passionate labour that shifts the entirety of the risk onto 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 instrument by which the labour of those who possess it is devalued.
Unpaid labour is not equally accessible to all. Those who possess familial support, savings, a residence in a city with cultural offerings, or simply time, may chain together unpaid internships and await the arrival of an opportunity. Those who do not are excluded, or enter under subordinate conditions. This is how a mechanism of selection by social class operates: the cultural sector, which considers itself open and diverse, narrows in practice to those who can afford to work for free. The diversity we proclaim contradicts the threshold through which one must enter.
Unpaid cultural labour 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 what has occurred is simply the exploitation of labour. The boundary between a genuine opportunity and benign exploitation depends upon whether that promise is ever translated into rights and remuneration.
Stating this from a foundation with limited resources necessitates honesty. I do not claim that paying well is simple when the funds are absent; I am aware that they are frequently absent. However, there is a distinction between an inability to pay and the normalisation of non-payment as if it were part of the sector's inherent charm. Naming the temptation is the primary antidote to it. There are decisions within our control even with a modest budget: to refrain from labelling labour as 'collaboration', to avoid selling visibility as if it were a salary, to recognise and dignify that which cannot always be remunerated, and to strive for the capacity to remunerate it.
Paying for cultural labour, even modestly, is not merely an economic matter. It is a means of affirming that such work possesses value. The sector defends its own value poorly when it accepts that it be performed for free; every time it does so, it informs 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 to request a privilege. It is to treat culture as work.
On the 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).