(Non)Art labor: Graphic designers’ imagination of their artistic labor

Abstract

This article examines how graphic designers in Turkey position their work within the ambiguous boundary between art and market-oriented production. Drawing on 41 in-depth interviews, it argues that this ambiguity is not a neutral structural condition but is unevenly lived across gendered subject positions under neoliberal labor regimes. Building on Katja Praznik’s framework of the “paradox of art,” whereby artistic labor is symbolically elevated as autonomous while being economically disavowed and severed from wage relations, the study demonstrates that this disavowal is actively reproduced through gendered processes. While male designers sustain artistic identities alongside market participation, women increasingly distance themselves from artistic subjectivity as a survival strategy. Even among urban women relatively exempt from domestic labor, its underlying logics—affective investment, flexibility, and systematic undervaluation—re-emerge within creative work. Non-binary designers experience precarity in its most intensified form, facing both economic insecurity and the absence of stable recognition.