Who gets the credit?

I’ve been thinking about how one becomes prolific. After all, each of us has a limited amount of hours in a week, a year, a life. Kind of like a “life budget.” If you count out how many hours it takes to finish a painting (“work budget”), then divide the life budget by the work budget, you end up with a maximum amount of paintings you can create in a lifetime. Or books, songs, or poems, or sculptures.

Of course, there’s a way to create more: hire people to help!

Which brings up the question of credit. If an artist has other people doing most of the painting for him, who is the actual creator?

I say “him” because most of the artists working in this model are, and have been, men. Perhaps it’s because men tend to make more money and can afford help? Women earn about 79 cents for every dollar men make in the U.S. The numbers are even more exaggerated in the art world. Of the $196.6 billion spent at art auctions between 2008 and 2019, work produced by women accounted for only $4 billion, or around 2% of the total sales. During that same period, Picasso’s work sold for $4.8 billion, more than all 6000 female-made artworks combined. Even though a Frida Kahlo painting set a new record for female art ($54.7 million), the inequality is still vast.

Warhol’s “Factory” model of using assistants to create his art is not new. Classical artists had apprentices who mixed paints, cleaned, stretched canvases, even painted the underlayers. But in those cases, the young apprentices learned the craft from their mentors, and often received food and board, even becoming members of the family. In today’s modern art factory model, the workers are go uncredited, and are often underpaid.

Damien Hirst is a perfect example. In order to create the complex pieces that sell for millions of dollars, he employs numerous artists, technicians, and assistants to create his work. He justifies this by stating that art is an idea, not a product—the foundation of Conceptual Art. But during the pandemic, he laid off 63 employees, even while his studio benefitted from government loans.

It’s clearly an established practice. Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley, Takashi Murakami, they all rely on helpers to boost their output. One of the few high-paid female artists, Yayoi Kusama, employs assistants who do everything from setting up her palette at arm’s length to painting dots.

Reminds me of when I worked at Gemini G.E.L. in the late 80s. I was tasked with drawing Lichtenstein’s stripes at precise 70-degree angles. When I left Gemini to work at Disney Imagineering, the tasks were more interesting, but I still didn’t get credit. None of us were allowed to sign our art, even for internal review. At least at Disney, that was expected because we worked at a corporation, where we got decent pay and good benefits.

There are enough successful artists who don’t use the Factory-style production model to show that it is possible to be prolific without having someone else create their pieces. Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, David Hockney, and many others do their own painting. Those are the ones I admire most. While I can appreciate the factory model—after all, I worked with Disney for 30 years—I appreciate work that embodies the spirit and labor of the artist who created it.

Art Heals

Even though she employs helpers, Yayoi Kusama does the most of work on her own paintings. It's a form of healing for her. She has struggled with hallucinations and hearing voices since she was ten.

Kusama has said, "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art."

She was always prolific, long before she could afford assistants. And she was original. Warhol stole a few of her early ideas (and never gave her credit). But she beat him at his own game. Today, she is the top-selling living female artist, far outpacing Warhol's output and sales during his lifetime.

With love and light,

Maggie