Vol. 1, No. 12: Feeling Conned
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Performance Improvement Plan
Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: info@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.
Dear Soft Labor,
While a graduate student at a prominent research university, I had the opportunity to work with a cultural critic and activist whose work I greatly admired and even cited within my own thesis project. While they are internationally renowned for their work, they are also a local celebrity in the coastal city I live in. Everyone knows them; they are seemingly everywhere, always.
My grievance: I performed a significant amount of research for a book that gained vast acclaim within our shared field; I also offered extensive, repeated editorial feedback that I believe shaped the form and even content of its narrative. And yet, not only did the author fail to cite or thank me for my contributions—neither in the book, nor at any of the numerous events accompanying its publication—they also dodged payment of an agreed-upon research stipend.
Some time has passed, but I still feel burned by this individual, who I run into all the time at openings and lectures. They act as if nothing happened! What can I do?
From the ivory tower,
Feeling Conned
Dear Conned,
You were indeed bamboozled! This person violated a number of ethical and social standards and you have every right to feel as you do—even ex post facto. We’re frankly surprised that you haven’t launched a bit of a local whisper campaign against them in the meantime. (Or have you?!)
While the lack of payment remains egregious and the in-person social interactions around that hard fact are simply bizarre, we’re sorry to say that situations like yours aren’t that uncommon. Famous People—whether H1 header-famous or in the case of this individual, a decided H2—seem to be exceptionally self conscious of their own perceived notoriety, which can translate into the sort of hijinks you describe here. We’ve seen countless cases of grey-area fraud in the creative world wherein a more senior practitioner—a designer, artist, or professor, say, or the very kind of writer you describe—casually cribs the ideas of an unknown novitiate while acting as though their behavior falls under the guise of "fair use."
How might you handle these lingering feelings? You’re older now; you come across the offending individual frequently. You could confront them. Perhaps you should!
What we would do, however, is simply put them on ice. The next time you see this person, lock eyes for a cold, hard moment that says "we both recognize what happened here." Do it again on your next encounter, and the next after that. People know what they've done wrong. Sometimes it takes but a glance to remind them.
Keep it frosty.
Yours,
Soft Labor
Search Results
“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.
🔗 We love chatting with Brian Droitcour IRL, so to hear his sense of humor, acute critical chops, and sharp tone sing through in his latest for Cultured magazine, "Seeing Through the Slop: Brian Droitcour’s Guide to Digital Art That Slaps," was a pleasure. Recommended.
🔗 More on the slop! A.I. scholar—her professional accolades are dizzying—and longtime Soft Labor intellectual hero Kate Crawford is all over the place again, from a co-authored New York Times opinion piece on the environmental impact of A.I. to "Eating the Future: A Metabolic Logic of A.I. Slop" in September’s E-Flux.
🔗 "The Leftist Podcaster Who Studies Online Radicalization" is Chris Wiley’s New Yorker profile of artist, researcher, and author Josh Citarella, whose work we’ve been following for what feels like forever. Citarella has recently become more transparent about the strategy behind his work, which collectively has shone light on decidedly dark corners of Internet culture. A very well-advised tactical move.
🔗 The Algorithms That Dictate Our Lives Are Not Neutral. We'd like to believe that this is a self-evident statement, but it isn't, so Jacobin's Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee and Nandita Shivakumar deliver a not-so-casual PSA.
🔗 We, like many, are anticipating Chris Kraus’s latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together and do hope to love it as much as we did Summer of Hate. Sometimes the publication of new work warrants a little binge around the author’s previous work, and reading her latest made us pluck a (definitely lesser-known) palm-sized Semiotexte publication from a high shelf: Where Art Belongs, a 2011 series of essays around collectivity and art that we’re currently re-reading. We remember it feeling "very LA" the first time around, whatever that means!
🔗 How is the U.S. government shutdown impacting museums? Hyperallergic reports.
Progress Report
"Progress Report" updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades.
▶️ We recently perused a copy of PASSING THROUGH MOVING IN AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT, a book of Gordon Matta-Clark’s New York City graffiti photographs shot between 1972–73, with texts by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jonathan Lethem, designed by Soft Labor collaborators Other Means and published by OM Books. As a physical object, this book is a gorgeous fever dream flip book of a long-gone version of New York City, as well as a glimpse into a lesser-known part of Matta-Clark’s practice. The book is on presale now through the OM Books website.
Dress Code
"Dress Code" spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.
Nota Bene
Soft Labor (the strategic consultancy) is currently taking on new clients. Here's more about what we do and how we do it. Contact founding principal Sarah Hromack-Chan at sarah@softlabor.biz.