A timely and hard-hitting op-ed, Zainub Verjee engages with the issues of Artists and labour in times of COVID19 crisis. She writes, “in times of uncertainty and fear during the pandemic lockdown, enjoying works of art—an online painting or performance or 
reading—has become a routine. Yet in a cruel irony, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed our hypocrisy about the artists and their labour. It reflects how the deeper questions on labour of artists, apart from lip service, continues to be an unattended policy issue.”
Highlighting the hypocrisy surrounding artists and their labour during this pandemic, she writes: “Today, the world of labour looks a lot like the way art labour has looked for decades.”
“A very rich, dense opinion piece by Zainub Verjee that puts the finger on the biggest issue facing thousands of artists during the COVID-19 crisis. It asks the right questions about artists and cultural workers labour policies and offers options for change. The lack of adequacy between labour law and the realities of artists’ work and new forms of work is showing and it hurts,” says Julien Valmary, Director of Grants at the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
On the op-ed Gita Hashemi, a Toronto Artist and critic says, “It asks the right questions about artists and cultural workers labour policies and offers options for change. The lack of adequacy between labour law and the realities of artists’ work and new forms of work is showing and it hurts.”
Zainub’s op-ed was very widely shared and became a trending story on a topic which is generally not mainstream and showed that conversation on these issues of Artists’ labour matters.
Click link to read the post at the source: https://www.straight.com/news/zainub-verjee-covid-19-crisis-has-exposed-hypocrisy-about-artists-and-their-labour
