Precarious careers: A longitudinal study with contemporary visual artists from emerging to established career stages

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of artists’ careers over eight years. It investigates artists’ career paths including developments, highlights, challenges, and stasis over eight years. This is a longitudinal study that comprises two sets of interviews conducted with the same fifteen artists in 2013 and 2021. It analyses artists’ reflections on their careers as emerging artists in 2013 and as established artists in 2021. It exposes how these artists’ experience changes and shifts along their career paths, yet, how the one continuity throughout their careers is precarity. Together, this longitudinal study uncovers new knowledge on the nature of artists’ careers by exposing how precarity is experienced over the course of their careers. This also develops existing discourse on precarious work and labour. Together, this expands understandings on ‘precarity’ in the creative industries by showing how it is experienced in artists’ careers as something that is tangible and mental, how it is experienced across their careers, and how strategies are found to cope with this precarious career. Addressing this can shed new light on the nature of artists’ careers and the nature of work in the creative industries today.