Our society has undergone profound change as a consequence of globalisation, technical advances and modernisation processes. At the same time, this change has led to the loss of thousands of jobs. Since we define being part of a society primarily through the factor of work, the rise in unemployment is also threatening social cohesion. Thus, the question about the future of work has become a central issue of our social development.
As fewer and fewer people are employed in regular jobs, an increasing number of people work without social and financial security.
To counter this development, the definition of work must be reconsidered and newly determined.
In their search for new models, the arts and cultural sector, and especially the cultural industry, have turned into a sunrise market for employment. This development has been supported by the education policy of the European Commission (which anchored culture into the employment policy guidelines) and the increased use of new technologies. To give an example, the EU study “Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitisation” (link to PUBLICATIONS) assumes that 7.2 million people are employed in the cultural sector within Europe.
This may sound promising. However, when we consider the typical work and life situations of artists, it becomes quickly apparent that this development has a downside as well. Due to the ongoing rationalisation, the precarious and atypical work and employment conditions that have always characterised the arts and cultural sector have turned into models for the entire labour market. Typical characteristics of such problematic employment conditions include:
• Low share of normal employment conditions
• Short-term employment and temporary contracts
• Work agreement, freelance work and minimal employment
• Project work with high demands for flexibility
• Secondary employment in jobs other than arts and culture
• Entrepreneurship and “pseudo-independence”
• Patchwork careers
It is therefore imperative to create general conditions that allow artists to develop new employment with their skills in order to improve their work and income situation. However, it is important to sensitively look at the potential of artistic work for social transformation processes. Only then will artistic approaches be able to give important impulses for change in different social areas.
In their artistic projects, artists often seek to close the gap between art as a business and artistic work in social or public settings. This tendency has been growing steadily stronger since the 1980s throughout Europe. Thus far is has been analysed primarily from the perspective of art theory but only very little from the viewpoint of employment policy.
Against the backdrop of this expanded concept of art, new occupational fields and demands have arisen in the Third Sector.
Artists have increasingly given fresh impetus to this area by utilising the potential inherent in artistic processes.
New areas of work are opening up especially in relation to social services that rely on artistic skills coming into play: artists work as intermediaries in social sectors such as health care, social welfare work (the homeless, refugees, senior citizens, etc.), culture (museums, tourism, etc.) and education (schools, youth centres, etc.).
The cooperation of people with widely varying backgrounds and different sets of skills and expertise are creating a whole new type of work. The integration of artistic potential into existing labour structures may yield support or impulses for the discovery of new perspectives and approaches.
