Art and Work

In the face of the ideology of creative genius, sociology has long been interested in artistic activity as work comparable to that which takes place in other professional spheres. The eminently collective aspect of all artistic activity has thus been highlighted: the creation of work always presupposes collaborative relations between several people, even if common sense minimizes or even forgets the role of some of them. Like others, artistic work has its conventions, following an organization that it is possible to describe, and creative processes that are part of the history of each artistic profession. While the norm of self-fulfillment and rejection of utilitarian logic is widespread in artistic professions, they do not escape economic criteria and are organized in the form of careers made up of successive stages, often marked by the uncertainty and precariousness that characterizes employment in the art worlds. This session proposes to explore, from different angles (economics, gender relations, precarity, environment, new technologies, etc.), questions relating to the specificity of artistic work and professions, as well as their renewal.