The Real Cost of Creative Work: Why We Undervalue What Matters

“Last week, an artist asked me a question I couldn’t answer on the spot: ‘Why does a corporate strategist charge 10 times what I do for an hour, and yet I feel guilty asking for my own rate?’”

We sat with that for a moment. Both create value. Both require years of training. Both solve problems that didn’t have solutions before. But one is called consulting; the other is called passion.

Here’s what most people misunderstand: when you commission a painting that takes 40 hours to complete, you’re not buying 40 hours of labour. You’re buying 15 years of studying composition and colour theory. You’re buying thousands of hours of failed experiments that taught what doesn’t work. You’re buying the courage to develop a distinct voice in a saturated field.

Artist Portia Roy in her studio

The Passion Trap

The devaluation of creative labour runs deeper than economics; it’s philosophical. We’ve been taught that work is something you endure for compensation, while passion is something you do for love. Therefore, if you’re passionate about your work, compensation somehow diminishes its purity.

This is a trap and a relatively recent one.

For most of human history, craftspeople and artists were compensated fairly for their expertise. A master painter commanded significant fees not despite their passion, but because of their mastery. The “starving artist” myth emerged alongside industrial capitalism, which needed to separate “productive” factory labour from “unproductive” creative work.

Today, we celebrate Van Gogh in museums while telling living painters their work isn’t worth living wages. We want creativity to be pure and separate from commerce, while building billion-dollar industries on creative labour. Streaming services profit from musicians. Social media platforms profit from visual creators. But the individual creator? They should do it for exposure.

Who Gets to Be an Artist?

When creative labour is systematically devalued, only people with financial safety nets can afford to be artists: wealthy hobbyists, people with family support, or those who can sustain themselves through other means.

Everyone else faces an impossible choice: make art and struggle financially, or abandon creative practice for economic survival.

This isn’t meritocracy. It’s economic gatekeeping disguised as passion-testing. The artists who “make it” aren’t necessarily the most talented; they’re often the ones who can afford to persist.

A Different Framework

What I tell artists now: your passion makes your labour more valuable, not less. Passion drives excellence, the extra hours of refinement, the willingness to start over, and the commitment to mastery over decades. That dedication should be compensated, not exploited.

And what I tell collectors and companies: when you underpay for creative work, you’re not getting a good deal. You’re extracting value from an already fragile ecosystem. Fair compensation isn’t charity, it’s sustainability.

The Bigger Question

What kind of culture do we want to build? One where creativity is a luxury for the privileged few? Or one where creative labour is valued as essential infrastructure, as important as engineering, medicine, or law?

Culture doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s built by people dedicating their lives to creating things that didn’t exist before. If we don’t value that labour, we lose it.

Fair compensation for creative work isn’t about being “nice to artists.” It’s about recognising that culture, beauty, innovation, and meaning don’t emerge from economic precarity. They emerge from sustainable creative practices.

And sustainability requires that we value creative labour not someday, not posthumously, but right now.