My traditional James North Art Crawl post is still in the works (who knew that cannelloni was such a time-consuming labour?) but as a consolation prize, I’d like to direct you to a real eye-opener of a post at Artworld Salon.

Jamie Oliver’s Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni.

In ‘Money for Nothing,’ London-based writer Ossian Ward reports on No Soul For Sale, an installation of independent collectives and art publishers that was housed last weekend at the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern (a 2009 edition of the event was held at the scrappier, less mainstream X-Initiative in NYC). For a tenth-anniversary event for the Modern, the resulting chaos didn’t make much of a critical impression (to quote Jonathan Jones of The Guardian: “we were trapped among feedback-playing guitarists, ironic souvenirs, mashed-up magazines and all the other detritus of imaginations that have long since given up. It was like an afternoon with Bob and Roberta Smith’s less gifted mates.”), but it’s the shit behind the shit that’s drawing the most fire, especially among British artists who wrote an open letter condemning the Tate Modern edition of No Soul For Sale for merely offering artists a spirit of “reciprocal generosity” rather than, say, compensation for the expense of making and shipping their art to London.

That’s right. Even an art-hedonist’s playground like the Modern, with its swank upper-floor restaurant/bar and everything, is guilty of not paying artists for their work.

Getting back to Ossian Ward’s post, and this crispy summation:

Those who penned the open letter clearly believe that this exchange might be closer to outright exploitation, with Tate benefiting through increased audiences and shop revenues while participants remain out of pocket. One commenter to my piece online said: ‘No money for materials, tickets or accommodation… Some coffee I think. Nice one Tate.’ Let’s call this the art system’s hidden ‘Gift Economy’ – working for nothing or for some ethereal glow of mutual advantage. We should even be grateful. Never mind the political backdrop of a new government here in the UK that’s about to slash arts budgets across the board, this must be a familiar scenario for struggling art professionals the world over.

So long as the myth of the romantic artist willing to work for warm fuzzies is allowed to keep hold, situations like this will continue to crop up everywhere. And okay, it doesn’t help that many of us are strongly compelled to produce art in defiance of financial gain already, but the ability to couch exploitation in the language of conceptual practice is even less helpful to the real-life concerns of practicing artists.

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