Artist at work against work?

The starting point for the article is a thesis by Bojana Kunst, saying that the work of a contemporary artist is, on the one hand, bound to the 'bizarre fantasies about creativity', on the other, it is 'becoming more and more labour and less and less creativity'. The relation between labour and creativity is examined in a historical perspective: through phenomena of autonomous artistic work, philosophical idealisation of creative 'genius' and emergence of copyright. The relation between productive and unproductive labour and growing tendencies toward 'productivisation' in culture and art are also considered. The article concludes that what is at work in (creative) work is a struggle against (creative) work.