By Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan
In the Opinion section in the Washington Post, the Editorial Board writes about the unintended consequences of two recent minimum wage policies—D.C.’s Initiative 82 and California’s AB 1228. The goal was to lift incomes for low-wage workers. The result: hiring slowed, restaurants closed, and some workers ended up with less money, not more. As they put it, “labor demand curves slope downward.” Raise the price of labor, and employers buy less of it.
What if the same thing happens when we raise pay for artists?
The call for “fair pay for artists” has grown louder in recent years. It’s hard to disagree with the moral premise. But if we treat this like a labor market—as we should—we have to consider the tradeoffs. If we raise wages, we’ll get fewer gigs. Some of the organizations that currently offer opportunities to artists will stop doing so. Some projects won’t happen. And fewer artists will be hired, especially those who are early-career, high-risk, or working on the experimental margins.
But the real question might lie in what happens deeper down, in the contracts and incentives that underlie creative labor. The arts aren’t like fast food. Much of the work is speculative—developing a show, composing a piece, building a portfolio—without any guarantee of future payment. What we often call “sweat equity” is fundamental to how the field works. If we impose a rigid wage floor, we shift how risk is allocated. And that has consequences.
Just like raising hourly wages, shifting risk from creator to buyer will cut down on sales and gigs for creatives. Plus, changing the incentives will change the very nature of artistic work being conducted. The ‘fair’ work will look more corporate with artists having less stake in long-term value. Progress?
More perversely, the system could tilt toward those already proven. Only artists with track records, credentials, or institutional reputations will clear the bar for upfront wage commitments. The rest? Locked out. The “rich get richer” dynamic isn’t just a cynical prediction—it’s baked into the contracting logic. In a world of imperfect information and hard-to-measure inputs, only the lowest-risk artists get high wages. Everyone else gets nothing.
Meanwhile, rent-seeking flourishes. If there are fewer paid gigs, but the pay is higher, competition for those gigs intensifies. Instead of sweat equity in the work, artists invest sweat equity in winning the job—via unpaid internships, inflated degrees, or online reputational arms races. Art schools might love this outcome: higher credential value, more tuition revenue, and a more tightly gated career path. But it’s not clear the art world—or the public—is better off.
And here’s where the analogy with fast food breaks down entirely. In arts labor markets, price isn’t just a function of supply and demand—it’s a function of risk, uncertainty, and asymmetry of information. That’s why traditional wage models often fall apart. “Fair pay” is often shorthand for paying artists during periods of creative development—when the product doesn’t yet exist, and the outcome is unknowable. That’s not a wage issue. It’s a contract design issue. And if we try to solve it by imposing wage floors, we’ll likely eliminate the very conditions under which most new work is made.
If this sounds like a defense of the status quo, it’s not. There are market failures in the arts—but they’re not always where we think they are. If we want to raise artist incomes, we should focus less on redistributing risk through wages, and more on correcting demand-side imbalances. The problem isn’t just that artists aren’t paid fairly—it’s that not enough people pay for art in the first place.
So if we want to see higher pay, we need to see more paying. That means growing demand, reducing friction for buyers, and building broader public appetite for artistic work. It also means embracing nuance in how we think about compensation. “Fair pay” can’t just mean “hourly wages for everything.” It has to account for uncertainty, incentives, and the value of speculative work. Otherwise, we may end up with a labor market that’s more fair, but far less functional.