With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.
I’m a gallery assistant at a great nonprofit in Los Angeles. This is my first job after school and I’m enjoying it a lot, even my commute from Los Feliz. The director is nice despite having very specific taste in art and music. Our openings are fun and crushed with people, but the after-parties really suck. The director insists on DJing his dusty music that sounds like rock ’n’ roll disco from 50 years ago. No one can dance to that shit, and my friends never stick around because they think I work at an old art place. How can I convince my boss that I should DJ instead, to keep the party moving?
Working for sunsetting boomers and namby-pamby Gen-Xers can lead to some very dark, definitely not dank after parties, and worse yet, negative-aura galas. Becoming old and irrelevant is sadly unavoidable, but spinning vibe-killers is the wrong type of slay. Tell DJ Methuselah that you got dibs on the late shift at the next opening. He can scratch his Ohio 78s while people show up, but your sigma playlist hits at 11pm. Ye olde bossman will be freed up to schmooze with high rollers, and your friends will have pounded enough free booze to fully own the dance floor. If he resists, you will just have to suck it up and watch him sweat to the oldies.
My art-handling jobs dried up this year in a financially frightening way. After lots of searching, I finally landed an assistant position on the sculpture production team of a well-known artist with a giant studio in Brooklyn. The studio manager asked me to sign a nondisclosure agreement, with the explanation that their commissioned projects need to be kept under wraps. That makes sense, but there are other troubling clauses, including one stating that I must refrain from speaking to the artist and cannot make eye contact unless directly addressed by him. I really respect the artist, but this is a drag, and very difficult to practice. Should I sign the NDA?
The dread that arises from being unable to find work is the flipside of the forlorn feeling that comes with being gainfully employed. A paycheck and health insurance allay many basic anxieties, but they also have a way of limiting perspective and making it so that you can barely see yourself, much less look at your boss. Given the current nadir of our pre-apocalyptic gig economy, signing a dubious NDA may be a moral quandary to reckon with after depositing your first paycheck. We aren’t saying that we like NDAs, but what other option does a financially strapped person like yourself have?
The primary reason that employers use NDAs is that they have something to hide. It could be a patent-pending invention or a proprietary manufacturing process, but we’re talking about a sculptor here, so you’re right to worry about more nefarious possibilities. Our worried minds leap to hands-on modeling and unwanted body-casting, but it may be more about menial personal tasks like going out to return frivolous Amazon purchases or picking up the artist’s generic brand Viagra at the pharmacy (yeah, you saw the prescription and looked it up). Either way, signing that NDA means that you have to start seeing nothing and saying nothing, without getting sexually harassed or routinely humiliated.
Do you have a connection to anyone who works at the studio? Wrangle some intel from an inside source if you can, or better yet, from someone who fled. One important question to ask yourself is how much NDAing do you need to witness or experience before going AWOL? Just because an artist likes to work pants-less doesn’t make them an assaulter—or so you might have to say if you sign that agreement.
