After Gallery Weekend Berlin is Before the Gallery Weekend Berlin.

There are a lot of labor issues we gloss over in the art world, in the name of … well, admit it, the minute I said “labor,” you felt your art world pizzaz deflate. It is like Amazon and the word Union. We all aspire to an IN, the exclusive parties, the exclusive sales, exclusively being proclaimed a genius by someone with exclusive access to your Art, the museum board, the mega collector, the art critic. I can interchangeably use the terms exclusive and genius; they are both gatekeeping tools. Anyone could “make it” at any time (of course, not accurate), so we all tolerate the discrepancies, the elephants in the rooms, just in case we are in next. A fair amount of these insiders also end up in jail- just saying. Do some labor rights and laws get stomped over on the way? Who cares? We are in. There is, of course, no In and Out—just a system in place to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. The art market and artists have always made strange bedfellows. Like the slogan Stop Being Rich in the Art of the Working Class magazine right next to a BMW sponsorship or an ad for Peres Project Gallery. It is meta.

And while I am confident some galleries offer extra compensation for working on Sundays and even on Labor Day, right? RIGHT? it is such an easy line not to cross; not to have art workers work on the one freaking day a year that celebrates the fight for workers rights. To sign the letter to Gallery Weekend, visit this link. You can also follow Art Workers Berlin on instagram.

CORRECTION – Berlin based conceptual artist Adrian Piper is in fact the first black woman to win a Golden Lion at  the Venice Biennale in 2015. Artnet and Hyperallergic just did not bother fact checking (as usual). Or maybe it was that Piper “retired from being black”, in 2012, on her 64th birthday. * from the NYT: She did this by uploading a digitally altered self-portrait to her website, in which she had darkened her skin — normally café très-au-lait — to the color of elephant hide. It was accompanied by a news bulletin announcing her retirement.  “Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage,” she wrote. “Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!” (Through extensive genealogical work, she later determined that her African heritage is closer to one-eighth.)
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Speaking of fact checking that never happened, JK claimed in a recent interview with Berliner Morgenpost that his gallery survived the pandemic without claiming public funds. About that.

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