The Artworld Runs on Burnout. Can It Change?

It’s 2021 and I am on the phone to my colleague. Then I am not. I am on the floor, the phone still in my hand. “Hello?” I say. “Is everything okay?” they respond. I ask how long the line went silent for. Ten seconds. 

That should have been the moment. The next morning, I open my laptop to start work. Then I am back on the floor again, the chair tipped over. This was the moment. I call my manager and tell them I want to work, but I can’t. 

In the months before, there were times when I should have stopped and got help. Instead, I worked more – and became good at hiding symptoms. I kept quiet because I was grateful to be in this job. I kept producing, silently, until the production line buckled. 

Contrary to one of the more intrusive thoughts I had at the time, I was not alone. For this piece, I asked Instagram if anyone else in the arts had experienced burnout. I expected a handful of replies. I had fifty in two hours. 

Before you reach for the pitchforks: this isn’t a story about toxic bosses or dysfunctional organisations. They are part of it, but they're meteors orbiting a relentless sun – and everyone’s getting burnt. 

A difficult question before we go on: did you know what you were signing up to? When you decided to become an artist, a gallerist, a writer or a technician, wherever you fit in this glittering constellation – did you know the hours would not be 9-5? That the money would be modest and often late? That you would hand over not just your professional self but a large piece of your actual one? Did you know this job could hurt you and reward you in the same stroke? I am not asking if you think those things are ok. I’m asking if you knew. 

I did. I signed up anyway, assuming the highs would cover the lows. What I hadn't priced in was the prospect of ending up with a (temporary) allergy to art and the nervous system of a fire alarm. 

Caroline Walker, Maternity 13, 2021, ink on paper, 47.5 x 33 cm © Caroline Walker. Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy the artist, GRIMM, Amsterdam/New York/London, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.

"Nobody willingly accepts exploitative practices,” says Mark Deuze over the phone from Amsterdam. “They often feel they have no choice." 

Last year, the media studies professor published Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick. In it, Deuze argues that passion is the mechanism of exploitation: the love people bring to creative work enables the industry to underpay and overwork them.

Burnout is universal. But in the arts a particular strain thrives quietly, unchecked. The paradox is cooked from two ingredients that are supposed to taste sweet: passion and gratitude. "Many people are intensely grateful for the chance to make art," says Deuze. "But in the same breath, they tell you that being in this sector is bad for their health.”

“The danger of gratitude is that it robs you of conventional rights a worker should expect,” he says. “If something goes wrong, you are held responsible for it happening to you, not the system."

Among the responses I received, there was a quiet, near-unanimous resignation. It's bad that people are burning out. Worse that they have stopped expecting anything else. Arts Professional's 2025 pay survey found nearly 80 per cent of culture workers were seriously considering leaving the sector, citing overwork, low pay and poor leadership. Earlier this year, a survey by AWITA x Artnet found that nearly half of women aged 25-44 are eyeing an exit from their art world jobs. This, Deuze says, is the industry’s dirty secret: "Churn is built into the system". 

Right now, things feel worse than ever. But are they? The conversation has a volume it didn’t have ten years ago – global searches for ‘burnout symptoms’ hit a record high in 2026. But volume is not necessarily prevalence. A 2025 Museums Moving Forward survey put art-museum burnout at 43 per cent, down from 52 in 2023. 

Even Deuze, who’s spent longer inside this subject than is advisable, will tell you that not much is new in the passion-exploitation story, and neither is the diagnosis. Sure, it got a punchy new classification from the World Health Organisation in 2019, but burnout was filed not as a medical condition but as a syndrome, an occupational phenomenon. The one thing it committed to was the root cause: work. 

As far back as the nineties, sociologist Angela McRobbie was describing how the creative economy launders precarity: dress insecure work up as the noble pursuit of passion and the whole grammar of labour dissolves. Because the worker becomes a micro-business of one, failure feels personal. When precarity is wrapped in prestige, who cares if you are overworked and underpaid – you have been chosen. 

William Powhida, Art World Insider (Robocop), 2019 , watercolor and acrylic on paper, metadata: posted July 18th , 2019. 147 likes, 38 x 38 cm. Courtesy the artist

Many times during my career, I've been told to stop taking things so personally. Beyond being irritating and gender-laden, the comment misunderstands the job. My work, like many people in the arts, runs on my person – my imagination, opinions, relationships, nerve, taste. These are not perks we throw in for a laugh and a bit of risk. They are requirements for the role – the raw materials that make us good at the job. 

The greatest occupational hazard is becoming the occupation. Work bleeds into socialising, socialising into friendship, and the people who look like friends turn out to be colleagues. If you're never truly off duty, you have no time to recover – or to notice the damage until it's done.

"In the art world, most of your friends and relationships are entwined with work," one magazine editor told me. “It's been a process of, over a couple of years, really deliberately trying to not have all of my identity bound up with my job.”

Amid all this on-the-clock fun, a body screaming – though from the outside it photographs beautifully.

It is curious to observe how close the vocabulary of this industry aligns with belief. There is a sense that working in the arts is a calling through which we have a divine right to provide, protect, and sell. God-given talent becomes an obligation: a gift you are duty-bound to use, often because others have a stake in it. To waste it is the biggest sin of all – even if you sacrifice your health in the process. 

Covid did the grim favour of switching the machine off long enough for people to see the shape of their lives. "It made visible how much had been organised around speed and survival," the artist Hannah Marshall told me. When all the perks dried up, the maxim that 'work should make you happy' no longer held water. As Deuze puts it, people realised they could do the thing they believed in, passionately, and still not afford a mortgage.

The bargain of the arts was always visibility over money: you get paid in being seen and in seeing the tangible results of your work. What has changed is how much of the being-seen now falls to you, unpaid and unending, on platforms built for turnover and allergic to depth. Expansive practices mined by AI and condensed into flat social strategies for a few passive likes and microdosed dopamine. Visibility, as Marshall says, is not the same as viability.

"Nothing feels like success,” says Jonny Tanna, who runs Harlesden High Street Gallery. “You get one day of hype and that's it. Everyone's on the hustle, everyone's got a scarcity mentality.” 

Others concurred: galleries of every scale running international programmes on teams a corporate outfit would call recklessly thin. It’s those in the engine room that feel the heat. Although some blamed toxic, under-supported workplaces, most said the burden came from the 'wider culture', or from 'the pressure they put on themselves'.

A market that keeps its prices opaque was never going to be honest about its labour. The same machine that hides what a painting costs hides what it costs to make it. "There's a culture of keeping quiet," says the art advisor Laura Moses, who has experienced burnout twice in two years. "The art world is small and reputation matters." Complaint reads as disloyalty – insufficient love for a thing you are privileged to possess. Nobody wants to be the one who couldn't hack the dream job, especially when the industry's more precarious than ever.

One artist and social media editor told me he once rolled his eyes at the term burnout, filing it with the other “pseudo-diagnoses.” That was, until, in his words, he "couldn't get through half a day without fainting,” describing a stress-triggered autoimmune condition. "I realised I was trading my health for career growth."

As a culture, we like our artists to suffer. The genius must be tortured. The more pain and anguish, the better the work. Indeed, many throughout art history have attested to making their best work in the darkest of times. In other art-world jobs, exhaustion is a flex. Being slammed, being everywhere, never switching off – it all reads as being wanted, and being wanted is the entire currency. This gilded suffering can’t hold. Beyond anxiety, depression and fatigue, there was, among those I spoke to, the same side effect – a total loss of appetite for the thing they had come for: art.

Georgie Nettell, Opinion, Culture, Business, Lifestyle, 2016 (installation view, Reena Spaulings Fine Art). Courtesy the artist

When I experienced burnout, which mutated into anxiety, I got lucky with a supportive manager and team. But only with space to recover did I understand what had happened, and how to stop it happening again. It’s all very well showcasing the solutions – time off, better boundaries, listening to your body and responding – but, as Deuze says, this merely individualises a structural problem. Asking people who work in art to be more resilient is just splashing a sodden sponge. Deuze also found that ​​burnout is felt disproportionately by younger people, people of colour, people with disabilities and those with caregiving responsibilities. Class plays in too: many work multiple jobs to sustain their place with no financial cushion. Kirsty Jukes, northern representative of the Working Arts Club, told me: "[Working class people] have to work harder than those with the connections and the means. That's what instills the tendency to overwork."

We have little evidence burnout is rising – and nothing much to measure it against anyway. Yes, there's plenty about the current age that feels uniquely overwhelming, but glorifying the past is a national sport, and a deceptive one too. Things weren't necessarily better before – much was far worse. We were just quieter. Now, the industry has been caught red-handed in its con. The silence is breaking and that’s no small thing. 

I've come to think burnout isn't the system failing. It's running exactly as designed. The obvious fixes are easy to list and hard to enact in an industry so tangled that nobody's seen the end of the string since Sensation exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. It will be a long road, but I hope one day passion, gratitude and talent won't leave such a sour aftertaste. That the art world will value the people who hold it up enough to keep them. 

In the immortal words of Howard Beale in the film Network: “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more”. Honestly, why should we? We give these jobs our lives. We are not asking to have our heads patted or be told we are doing so good, sweetie. We’d just like to keep the candle burning. Ideally from one end. Is that too much to ask?