The "Pay the Artist" Problem

Ethical exchange requires clarity about what is being offered, who bears the risk, and what happens if the answer is no.

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Recently I encountered two separate mural opportunities posted online. I rarely engage with these types of posts, as I have learned to expect little from them. These likewise were of no use to me professionally, but paired together, they piqued my interest.

In the first, a local organization issued an open call framed as a contest. Artists were asked to provide sketches, mockups, and finalized drafts. It was made clear that no monetary compensation would be offered. The language emphasized community, ideology, implied generosity, and the presumption of opportunity, while the structure of the request resembled a commission. When commenters rightly pushed back, the organizers grew indignant. Critics had misunderstood who they were and what they stood for. Comments on the post have since been disabled.

In the second, a building owner made a post on Facebook. An artist had once requested to paint their wall at no cost, then ghosted. The owner had no prior plans for a mural and no budget to create one. But the wall was still there, and perhaps someone could use it. After all, for an emerging artist, an empty wall and a willing landlord are harder to find than you might think. In this case, no labor was requested. No concepts solicited. No moral appeal was made. Just a limitation, stated plainly: there was no money.

To me, these two cases are not ethically comparable. In one case, the artist bears disproportionate risk while being told it is a generous opportunity. In the other, the artist is offered optional risk with no moral demand attached. Yet the comments sections were identical. They contained the same accusations of exploitation, the same garden-variety invective, and the same appeals to dignity and fairness.

“Pay the electrician, pay the plumber, pay the artist.” Of course.

So why does art continue to generate moral confusion in a way that plumbing does not? We argue about unpaid work, exposure, obligation, and whether refusal is a right or a failure. Because art is bound up with identity, meaning, and dignity, price becomes a proxy for moral recognition. Paying the artist is assumed to honor their worth; not paying is assumed to deny their worth. Compensation is framed as the primary ethical act, when in reality it is only one possible signal among many—and often an imprecise one.

The plumber analogy tries to protect artists from moral erosion by re-anchoring art in the dignity of labor. The impulse is understandable, but it breaks down upon scrutiny. The plumber’s dignity is protected by the market because the service is discrete, the value is known, and refusal carries no symbolic weight. The artist’s refusal, by contrast, is often treated as a statement about identity, politics, or belief. Declining a project is not just declining work; it is expressing moral claim.

The confusion persists because, unlike almost anything else, art does not belong to a single exchange system. It operates simultaneously as labor, speculation, signal, gift, and cultural commons. It costs time, materials, skills, and attention—a real cost to the artist whether or not money changes hands. It’s also a wager; its downstream value is always uncertain. It’s a gift in that it almost always establishes goodwill. And once it enters the world, it becomes part of a shared cultural commons—it is copied, critiqued, reused, and argued over. Its meaning expands beyond the artist’s control. This is its nature, but it also means value can be extracted long after the artist has been paid, or without them being paid at all.

In transactions with artists, participants often invoke one system’s moral language while behaving according to another’s incentives. Art is treated as a commodity at the moment of exchange, a gift at the moment of compensation, and a public good at the moment of critique. Labor is requested with the expectations of a market transaction but justified through the rhetoric of generosity. Professional output is demanded, but compensation is deferred to symbolic rewards like exposure, alignment, or belonging. The artist absorbs the risk of all systems at once.

This is why art resists clean pricing. It is not plumbing. Its value is not consumed at the moment of exchange; it continues to act on the world afterward. Treating it as though it should behave like a single, closed exchange system is a category error.

The opportunity offered great exposure

Nowhere is this frame-switching more visible than in the language people reach for when they want professional output without professional obligation. “Exposure,” to name the most pervasive example, might function as compensation only if its value and likelihood are legible. This legibility must be subjectively valued by the receiver, not asserted by the giver. Because exposure is non-falsifiable, an offer of exposure usually means asking the artist to accept unpriced risk while the other party retains the upside.

An ethical transaction does not require equality of outcomes, only clarity of terms and freedom to refuse. A wall offered for free is not exploitation. A request for unpaid labor disguised as generosity often is. The difference lies not in the presence of money, but in whether obligations are explicit and voluntary. When terms are vague, when reciprocity is implied but undefined, or when moral language substitutes for clear exchange conditions, participants are no longer coordinating action honestly. Markets, for all their flaws, function because they make trade-offs legible.

An artist is not confused about the fact that their work is bound up with meaning and identity. We know this better than anyone. But we also know—often more clearly than our defenders—that we make a living by producing things for other people. We negotiate timelines, materials, scope, revisions. We invoice. We pay our bills. We live with the tension between vocation and trade.

However, when every unpaid scenario is labeled exploitative, regardless of who initiated or who bears the risk, the artist is no longer treated as an acting subject capable of consent. Beneath any comment from an artist voicing interest in an unpaid opportunity, you will find a reply guy saying, “You deserve to be paid for your work,” as if they necessarily needed reminding. This is paternalistic; it assumes the artist is incapable of assessing their own interests and must be protected from their own judgement.

The common discourse around unpaid labor replaces clarity with slogans. In doing so, it flattens art into labor when convenient, elevates it into a moral talisman when useful, and strips the artist of agency throughout.

From the artist’s side, the standard is simpler than the discourse suggests. An offer is ethical if it is honest about what is being exchanged, who carries the risk, and what happens if the answer is no. Everything else—price, prestige, exposure, ideology—is secondary. No one owes participation. No one owes risk.

All of this can sound abstract until it’s translated back into actual behavior. The question is not how artists should feel or what clients “ought” to do, but how exchange works when agency is taken seriously. Once you strip away the slogans and the outrage, what remains is a set of ordinary, unspectacular choices that artists and clients already make every day, whether or not anyone approves of them. If any ethical guidance follows from this, it is not a new rule about payment but a reorientation around choice:

• Agency comes first.
  Artists are allowed to accept unpaid work without moral shame. Doing so is not self-betrayal or complicity; it is a choice made in context.

• Trade-offs are real.
  Unpaid work is not “free.” It carries opportunity cost, habit-forming risk, and signaling effects—the information your choice sends to others about how you value your work, what terms you’ll accept, and how you should be approached in the future—often in ways you don’t control. That’s why moderation and discernment matter.

• Payment is the default expectation for professional work.

  Artists are entitled to be paid for their work, and any deviation from that expectation should be named, justified, and negotiated, not assumed.

• Offering unpaid work is not unethical per se.
  Unpaid opportunities can be offered without shame if they are honest about what’s being exchanged and accept that a) the adage “you get what you pay for” is absolutely true, and b) the offer may be refused or criticized.

• Silence is a market signal.
  Artists do not owe education, outrage, or justification. Not responding to bad offers is a legitimate, non-performative form of refusal.

• Markets correct through behavior, not moral theater.
  Bad offers should fail quietly through lack of uptake, not be litigated in comment sections. Invective may make for shareable content, but it also makes people more hardened in their biases.

If we want fewer bad deals, we must begin with clarity about what kind of exchange is actually taking place. Is this a gift? Then let there be no hidden expectations. Is this a commission? Then let the terms be explicit. Is this an investment in a future relationship? Then let both parties acknowledge the speculation and share the risk. Moral clarity comes from using precise language, allowing people to assess their own risk and to walk away without ceremony when those terms aren’t met.