The Art Workers’ Inquiry is an organizing group of workers seeking to build power across New York’s vast arts industry. We define art workers as anyone whose labor contributes to the artistic production process, from dancers to art handlers to bartenders at performance venues. The Art Workers’ Inquiry builds connections and strengthens bonds of solidarity between art workers with the ultimate goal of building a new, worker-run model of artistic labor.

 

The Art Workers’ Inquiry formed as a group when we decided to create a survey based on the original workers’ inquiry compiled by Karl Marx in 1880. Marx’s inquiry was commissioned by the French publication La Revue socialiste and comprised 101 questions that probed numerous aspects of the life of a worker. In addition to gathering research and forming a kind of ethnography of workers under capitalism, the inquiry aimed to push and agitate—in its progression of questioning—the survey-taker to think about the political implications of revolt and revolution. Though it was never carried out in Marx’s time, the template for the workers’ inquiry was put into use in the postwar period by the likes of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (a project initiated by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya), which tapped into the Black radical tradition in the United States. Workers’ inquiries were also conducted and weaponized by organizers in the Italianoperaismo (workerism) movement at the factories of Olivetti and Fiat. (Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi have written a comprehensive history of the workers’ inquiry in Viewpoint magazine.)

 

Tailored to the concerns of art workers, our first survey developed by the Art Workers’ Inquiry consisted of seventy questions divided into twelve sections, each centered on a topic such as labor, profession, or social reproduction. Our approach is interdisciplinary in order to expand our analysis of an industry that is extremely exploitative in part because it relies on the myth of “doing what you love.” We have conducted the inquiry one on one as well as with a class at Cooper Union, the DSA Media Working Group, and in open events at spaces including Interference Archive, Unnameable Books, and Stellar Projects.

 

We initiated our second large scale survey during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic when we were all living in isolation and unsure of the future. We asked art workers to elaborate on how the pandemic had affected their working and living conditions. We also asked what changes art workers would like to see in their lives after the pandemic. We presented our findings in a zine entitled “Art Work During a Pandemic.”

​

Many of the answers we received reflect fundamental changes that would impact the lives of all people, not just art workers. The responses overwhelmingly expressed a desire for a socially just world prioritizing a culture of care, love, and justice against one of exceptionalism, in which everyone would have the time and freedom to create and live an unalienated, fulfilling life. 

When the uprisings over George Floyd’s murder began, the cultural discourse firmly absorbed abolition as an idea with teeth. This was echoed in the responses we received to our pandemic inquiry. We were struck by the many respondents who were calling for police and prison abolition. 

​

Throughout all of our inquiries we've found that, when asked how we might imagine our futures differently, respondents consistently retreat from the specifics of revolutionary alternatives, big and small. The challenge then is to encourage bold and creative collective thinking towards another world. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future while continuing to work on material interventions around policing and prisons.