Just name your price! What artistic agents do
Naudier, Delphine
Just name your price! What artistic agents do - 2020.
51
This article studies how artistic agents negotiate artists’ fees (actors/actresses, screenwriters and filmmakers). As intermediaries, they represent their clients’ interests when dealing with the employers or funders of movies. In the absence of any established pay scale, the “price” of the artists is negotiated by mutual agreement, with the exception of the minimum for the lower fees. We analyze how the polarization of this world of work is shaped by the “symbolic production relation” which organizes it. We first show what social, commercial and cultural provisions artistic agents invest in the exercise of this activity. Then, we identify which conventions and according to what power relations they money the ‘name’ of their client. Finally, we analyse how this specific trade, which is governed by a project economics and an economics of singularities, is structurally constitutive of the individualization of pay.
Just name your price! What artistic agents do - 2020.
51
This article studies how artistic agents negotiate artists’ fees (actors/actresses, screenwriters and filmmakers). As intermediaries, they represent their clients’ interests when dealing with the employers or funders of movies. In the absence of any established pay scale, the “price” of the artists is negotiated by mutual agreement, with the exception of the minimum for the lower fees. We analyze how the polarization of this world of work is shaped by the “symbolic production relation” which organizes it. We first show what social, commercial and cultural provisions artistic agents invest in the exercise of this activity. Then, we identify which conventions and according to what power relations they money the ‘name’ of their client. Finally, we analyse how this specific trade, which is governed by a project economics and an economics of singularities, is structurally constitutive of the individualization of pay.
Réseaux sociaux