Are You an Artist Looking for Work? This New Website Wants to Connect You With Paying Customers Hungry to Learn How to Make Art

A new online marketplace is connecting artists who are hard up
for work with employers looking to hire them for their
expertise.

HireArtists.org is designed to work similarly
to TaskRabbit or Fiverr, websites that link gig workers to
employers looking for people to do one-off jobs. It invites
photographers, dancers, and website designers, among those in other
disciplines, to sell their skills and knowledge to anyone looking
for art lessons, or even to buy artworks. It’s free to sign
up, and unlike other sites, HireArtists doesn’t collect a fee.

For consumers sitting at home,
it provides an opportunity to break up the malaise of isolation with a
little entertainment. You can learn magic or how to write a
screenplay or even take drum lessons with a
member of the Blue Man Group.

“For artists, many of whom have
watched up to two years of paid work disappear almost overnight,
HireArtists.org is a way to deploy their skills to recover and
diversify their income,” Vallejo Gantner, the executive
director of the Onassis Foundation and cofounder of the
website, said in a
statement.

“For everyone else, this is a
moment both to help and to expand our world during this time of
confinement. We see it as a mutually beneficial experience and an
important model for creating new opportunities in a time of crisis
for some of our most vital and vulnerable communities.”

The idea came to Gantner, who
led Performance Space New York from 2005 to 2017, just three weeks
ago as New York went into lockdown and many began losing work,
including numerous artists. In an effort to support a friend, he asked her
to give him and his son
French lessons online.

“If these artists can’t do the
thing that is their core practice, what can they do? Almost every
artist has probably double-giggled their whole life,” Gartner said.
“How do we take advantage of the skill set that they’ve got? How do
we get people to be entrepreneurial about what they do? And how do
we fill people’s time?”

So far, more than 200 artists have signed up with the service,
which went live on April 3.
And while only a couple thousand dollars have changed hands so far,
Gantner predicts the number will grow.

Conceived in direct response to the economic crisis, the
platform is not necessarily built for the long-term. Gantner
acknowledges that the “gig economy”—which has been pushed,
disastrously, as a way for freelancers to become “entrepreneurs”
while undercutting permanent workers—has inherent problems. For
many, the current pandemic has highlighted the holes in the increasingly
precarious labor market.

“We’re approaching it knowing that,” he said. “But right now,
let’s try and get some money into people’s pockets.”

The post Are You an Artist Looking for Work? This New Website Wants
to Connect You With Paying Customers Hungry to Learn How to Make
Art appeared first on artnet News.