Sepp Eckenhaussen

We know that the economy of the arts is fundamentally flawed. According to a 2019 UNESCO report, ‘the largest subsidy for the arts comes not from governments, patrons or the private sector, but from artists themselves in the form of unpaid or underpaid labour’. As forty years of policy focused on ‘resilience’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘impact’ have failed to make art workers any less precarious, we urgently need to reboot our ideas around art, labour, and income. Can we imagine a sustainable art economy beyond precarity? How would this change the circulation of art works, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions?

Sepp Eckenhaussen (1993, he/him) is an arts researcher and organizer. His work focuses on visual art, digital culture, activism, policy, and new economies. At CARADT, he researches possible pathways towards economic sustainability in the arts, focusing on existing best practices around commons, cooperatives, basic income, and infrastructural critique as prefigurations of a sustainable art economy. Sepp’s objective is to identify, theorize, amplify, and contribute to these prefigurations, and – ultimately – to find out how the collective precarity of art workers be countered by a combination of political and economic innovations.

Next to his position at CARADT, Sepp works at the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), where he runs the research program Our Creative Reset. From 2020 until 2023, he was the co-director of Platform Beeldende Kunst, an activist think-tank that represents the interest of independent art workers and takes action for better art policy in The Netherlands. At the INC, Sepp has published the monograph Scenes of Independence: Cultural Ruptures in Zagreb (1991-2019) and the anthology De bevrijding van het mecenaat. He holds an rMA in Art Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Sepp writes op eds for Dutch newspapers and articles for various periodicals, including Boekman, Mister Motley, and Amsterdam Alternative.