At (Art)work Value: Gendered Aspects of Income and Livelihood, the Case of Women Artists in Israel

AbstractThis article examines women artists in Israel seeking to make a living from their art. Reviewing the field as a broad system of economic and social parameters, it places the Israeli scene in historical and economic contexts, analysing the difficulties women artists from various socio-economic groups face due to their gender and class background, as well as their ethnicity and nationality. The research is based on interviews with women artists and on intersectional analysis. A pioneering project in the field in Israel, it suggest that more research must be conducted in order to examine future issues in the working lives of women artists from various groups and diverse stages of their life-cycle.IntroductionThis article considers various issues related to women artists and the obstacles that prevent them from earning a dignified living in their chosen profession. The first section reviews the field as a broad system of economic and social parameters, while addressing institutional aspects of the field in Israel. The second part - based on in-depth interviews conducted with women artists from various socio-economic groups in Israeli society - presents a preliminary analysis of the obstacles faced by women artists when seeking to support themselves through their artwork. These obstacles include gender, class, ethnic, and national facets of oppression. The final section discusses various research possibilities that could aid women artists in the endeavor to support themselves through their art.The analysis demonstrates that the cultural imagination views such universal issues as remuneration and professionalism - regarded as fundamental elements of the professional work market - as irrelevant to in general and to women artists in particular. Other factors, including ethnicity, nationalism, and class, further compound the difficulties faced by women artists from various groups, as the discussion also deals with issues relating to agency and empowering development. The interviews conducted with women artists unveil the myth that the field is characterised by gender equality.The framework of the discussion: The fieldUnder Western praxis, artists were regarded as craftsmen until the Fifteenth century and the Italian Renaissance, their status and income derived from membership of organised, professional guilds. The rise of the French Romantic movement of the Nineteenth century (Kristeller, 1952; Wolff, 1981; Berlin, 1999) - which promoted the idea of art for art's sake, arguing that the arts are an autonomous field within society and that the artist is a genius (Kadish, 2010) - along with the concurrent decline of the patronage system, led to the view of the artist as a unique figure, unlinked to other professions and to the general work market (Zolberg, 1983).These Romantic and modern conceptions - still firmly ensconced in our own culture - have more recently been challenged by the sociology of art. Illuminating the social context of art, this approach undermines the premise that is separate from other areas of life. Rather than regarding the artist as an isolated and individual genius, this school stresses creative and earning processes as social acts. These acts demand cooperation between artists, the suppliers of materials and services, distributors, the experts who write and critique artistic creations, and the audiences whom ultimately consume them (Kadish, 2010). One of the most significant members of this school was Pierre Bourdieu who, in calling the world of a field, maintained that is a field - like all other social fields - structured on the basis of the power relations between agents who fight over resources and the very definition of the rules of its game (Bourdieu, 1983). It thus comprises a site wherein meanings are created - as, for example, determination of the value of work and the commodities within it.Art as a form of incomeAlthough the cultural imagination regards and economic as two very different entities - economics lying in the realm of the material and in that of the spirit - scholarly attention has increasingly been drawn in recent years to the complex links between the two concepts (Thorsby & Hollister, 2003; Towse, 2003; McRobbie, 2006; Thorsby, 2010). …