Compensation

Today on Twitter, a friend/teacher of mine posted this article by the New York Times about the lack of compensation received by writers and visual artists on many different projects. In many cases, artists/writers are approached by different companies "telling you how much they admire your work" only then to have them ask for you to do work for them, but not pay for it. Paying for it of course is "out of the budget" and out of the question for most of these companies. The article is right, artists and writers do the same if not more work than a lot of people in America's workforce. The fact that many people in our country believe that artists/writers should not receive money, and that their work is not important. This is mostly evident in the comments on the article, where multiple people express that they do not believe that artists/writers do any work, or any work that deserves even minimum wage. From my personal experience, ART TAKES A LONG TIME TO MAKE. It takes a lot of effort and time and sometimes has to be completely scrapped and restarted! I've spent up to four hours on small doodles, sometimes I've spent more than 10 hours! Artists and writers have it the hardest, they have to consult, then work, then show progress shots which the client might shoot down, keep working, show more progress, and the cycle goes until the piece is done! In my personal opinion, I believe there should be a minimum wage for artists. It's a job, it's work, and you shouldn't have to accept 15 dollars for a piece you spent 4 hours on. And all the people on the article commenting with "if you worked harder you'd get more" is just perpetuating the cycle of society's view of artists, that all artists are lazy and stuck up. And for some reason, a lot of people think artists are rich? I don't know where that one came from but it's true.