Suddenly, I felt exploited.?

It was me who felt exploited, not the artist who replied to my open-call invitation by saying that charging a $15 submission fee was exploitative. Their response made me wonder whether I was the one being exploited. After picking apart the reasoning with Gemini, I needed an AI with enough contextual awareness to understand why someone might think I was exploiting them. Apparently, it had come to this: asking a machine to explain human beings to me.

I wasn’t upset. I was just irritated, not with that particular artist, but with the carelessness of an entire market that considers charging $15 exploitative, even though its members come from capitalist countries and live within a system where payment for services is supposed to be straightforward. Yet somehow, they fail to recognize the value of labour.

I live in Southeast Asia. Years ago, before inflation reached its current levels, I charged $500 for fifteen minutes of file correction. That was roughly twice the basic monthly salary of a worker in Vietnam’s largest city. I never had a single client tell me I was exploiting them.

Looking back, if my old portfolio had carried the right names, or if my work had appeared in an internationally distributed artbook with proper curatorial selection, I would have charged more. Those signals have a price, and I know how to construct them. That is partly why I started this arthouse: to give artists the kind of context that makes galleries take their work seriously, scholarship committees consider their applications, and companies see more value in the people they employ. I know how these signals work because I used to need them myself.

It sounds crude, perhaps like throwing a bucket of cold water in someone’s face, but that is the truth. I have lived long enough to know that the world still operates through signals. People rely on them to assess value and credibility.

So what exactly is wrong with pay-to-play, dear artists?

Nobody submits this page. Someone has to design it. Designed by Hand-Fetish-Projects.

Artists, of all people, should understand that attention is work. Someone has to open your files, look beyond the thumbnails, read your statements, and spend time figuring out what you are trying to do. Someone has to decide whether your work belongs, what it might mean alongside other works, and how it should be presented. A folder of submissions does not become an artbook by developing curatorial judgment on its own.

Who will work with printing partners, deal with technical problems, and handle the production details, those tedious tasks that rarely appear in an artist’s biography but are essential to completing a project? Who will cross trade barriers, jump through bureaucratic hoops, and breach the Great Firewall to connect artists on opposite shores of the Pacific? Who will negotiate with people who have no particular reason to care about your work, build relationships, and somehow get your art onto a stage far beyond your own reach, not to mention the resources required to build that stage?

And the curator is only one part of the machinery. Someone has to design the publication; someone has to build and maintain the digital infrastructure that keeps it accessible; someone has to make sure the files, layouts, formats, and technical details actually work. None of these tasks completes itself out of professional courtesy. A designer cannot pay rent with the satisfaction of contributing to another designer’s visibility, and a developer cannot maintain a website with exposure. Everyone involved has time to account for, work to deliver, and bills to pay. Somehow, the only labour that seems to require no explanation is the labour artists expect others to provide.

A set of nails lasts two weeks. That, too, is a fleeting pleasure, yet nobody seems troubled by paying $100 for it. Meanwhile, whether your work gets selected or not, a curator, a designer, and a developer have already spent some of their 525,960 hours on this earth considering your submission. That is the total number of hours in a sixty-year lifespan. The nails will come off in fourteen days. Those hours are gone for good. Which one of us is supposed to be exploiting whom?

We are supposed to be operating on equal terms in this capitalist world, are we not?