If you are interested in being considered for inclusion please forward your abstract (200-250 words), name, and affiliation to M. Gabriela Torres at Wheaton College, MA (torres_mgabriela@wheatonma.edu) before March 1st, 2011. Feel free to contact us prior to submission as we are also happy to answer any questions you may have.

Artistic Employ and Aesthetic Production

Artists are a different sort of worker. Like those working in industry they too labor and are remunerated to create goods that will be sold or distributed to others, they are different from other workers in the ways that they make meaning of their productive acts. Do the aesthetic aspirations artists have for their work—as art—make their everyday practices as workers more intensely acts of self production? Does the work of art change with the changes in media environments of production? Looking at the experience of artists working in print and online media, this session explores they ways that artists work often unwittingly to create meanings about themselves through their work. The work of creating themselves through their art is traces tensions familiar to other workers: making a living wage, finding satisfaction in labor, attaining respect and stature, and creating an enduring body of work. The public artists discussed in this session, however, create themselves and their legacy through a negotiation of the tension between art—divorced from quotidian constraints—and the work of making art.