Home / Store / Zines / Museums Tell Me They Hate Me

Museums Tell Me They Hate Me

Museums Tell Me They Hate Me

by James Payne

54 p, black and white, 5.5" x 5"

$4.00

Out of Stock

"Paying Attention to the Language of the Unpaid Internship"

 James Payne examines the ethics of the unpaid internship in the art world. And he's not messing around. Oh no, this is no wishy washy essay or vaguely vitriolic comment thread on a New York Times article. Payne is naming names, bringing the pain, if you will. 

Throughout this tiny wallop of a zine, Payne captures, word for word, the language of how most major art museums define their internships. The answer is a resounding "lots of work for free." There's the Art Institute of Chicago's simple, to-the-point modernist prose: "compensation: unpaid." Then there's the more ornamental diction of LACMA that reads "this non-compensatory internship is appropriate for undergraduate, graduate, or post-graduate students [...] and library science. Academic credit can be arranged."

However they say it, museums are soliciting a mighty hunk of gratis labor as Payne's alphabetical catalog of art institutional offenders proves. From the hinterlands to the most mighty metropolis, Payne shows that if you're into working in fine art you may as well be a bajillionaire or just accept that museums do, in fact, hate all of us. -NY