Yelp Reviewers in Revolt
Toward a Revaluation of the Cultural Worker?
By DIADEM Staff
News broke this Halloween of a group of high volume Yelp.com reviewers suing the review giant in class action for using them as unpaid writers. Then last week, Orit Gat wrote for Rhizome on Yelp as an effective medium for community reviews of art gallery shows.
These events followed the launch of studies such as Cultural Workers Organize,a formal foray by a trio of Canadian academics into the questions of practical survival of critic/curator vocations in the face of the automation, disambiguation, and thirst for efficiencies that have been the hallmarks of the finance-first economy of the current epoch.
In the specific case of the new suit vs. Yelp, the complainants’ prospects may rise or fall on the strength of the Yelp terms and conditions each reviewer agreed to. Yet as often happens in deliberately plotted legal proceedings, what may result from the case even as a prelude to a loss for the plaintiffs is a new set of vocabularies, metaphors, or statistics measured to value, revalue, or up-value the modern cultural worker.
A 2011 study for the National Endowment for the Arts found that the performing and fine arts contributes 70 billion dollars to the American GDP on an annual basis.
That figure falls between the economic value Hollywood and its movies add (which is lower) and the value publishing and books creates (which is 50 shades higher). There are few examples of the creatives behind successful books and magazines failing to earn a decent wage. A dearth of pay for anyone touching even the smallest edge of a Hollywood movie is all but unknown. In bright contrast, artists, art curators, and art critics—and especially independent curators and critics—are at present some of the most income insecure creatives within the overall American economy.
Have visual arts cultural workers been impoverished by a lack of infrastructure funneling the dollar spend from the participatory audience, the viewers and guests, somehow into a platform transacting with the worker?
Few can dispute that professional quality art reviews are worth paying for. Traditional art media and their subscription rates are testament enough to the premise. And yet art reviewers and their curatorial cousins find themselves in a political economy with long established rules of contract and exchange. Suing a Yelp.com for day wages after signing up for the equivalent of painting the behemoth’s house for free may be a run toward the brambles.
For the running, the racers may find new, strong legs, in the form of a consensus to find ways that visual arts creatives can take back a share of their indisputable value.
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N.3. All copyright to text retained by Cavendish Projects
