It is time to fire your internship. More specifically if you are an intern you should fire yourself--eliminate your position.   This is one of the most powerful actions you can take.  Up to this point a majority of the efforts to reform the internship system have focused on convincing/coercing change from guilty organizations.  But this is only one side to this chicken-or-the-egg continuum.  The other, involves individuals everywhere recognizing and taking action on behalf of their labor.  Only reformation in both hemispheres will produce an equilibrium of value.

Nowhere is the culture of internship labor more ripe for change than the creative practices. Through institutional rhetoric and societal misrepresentation the labor of creativity has been supplanted by the recreation of creativity. In the way that most citizens toil through the day in order to recreate (e.g. skiing, pinball, jager bombs) artists have been taught to toil through the day in order to make art.  One of the chief perpetrators of this mutated equivalency is the internship. The contemporary art internship is the hazy den where recreation and labor; experience and compensation; education and data-entry are confused and muddled to produce a pathological yoke of undervaluing that can burden the artists through his or her professional career.  

In this spirit we would like to provide two working resources.  One for the individual and one for the arts organization. READ MORE