Irresponsible labor

In his 1939 lecture on Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry , Eric Gill compared the artist and the modern industrial laborer. They have much in common: “Both are normally engaged in making things. Both are normally workers with their hands. Both are normally paid for what they do and not paid if they don’t do it. (In this respect unlike either the man of business or the politician.) Both are commonly instructed as to what is required of them before they begin working.” Gill argued that the key difference is one of responsibility: “The artist is responsible for the form and quality of what his deeds effect; he is the responsible workman; he has responsibility and would be insulted if he were denied it; but the workman, the labourer, the hireling, the factory hand has been, as the theologian puts it, reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility ; he neither has responsibility nor does he now desire it. He is too deeply corrupted by his serfdom. The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.”

Gill argues further that the detachment of labor from artistic responsibility for the products of labor distorts modern understanding of the “fine arts.” Fine arts are “very important and even enthralling,” he says, but “only as important and enthralling as they now are by reason of the fact that the common arts in our sort of mechanized society do not give any scope for the satisfaction of those specially fine feelings which our fine artists are now the special purveyors of.”