Judging from the comments to my short essay, "How to Tell Your Children They Are Not Artists," its central point was entirely missed by many readers. But understand this: The article is not about my kids, or really about kids in general. It's about the way we think about the ideal subject for the jobs of our times. The model for the worker is actually the artist. How did this happen? When did we all become such artists? And why are we, as workers, asked to be like artists—innovative, independent, self-wonderful, self-flourishing? From Willing Slaves of Capital, a book by the French economist Frédéric Lordon:

[A] good number of recent studies in the sociology of work discovered in the figure of the artist a pertinent metaphor, and even more than a metaphor, a common model, for those employees reputed to have personal qualities of strategic importance to their company, notably ‘creativity’. Since neither the products nor the processes of creativity can be determined or controlled in advance, the only possible approach to the creative subject is one of ‘laissez-faire’.

This insight is not isolated to Lordon's work. It in fact informs a major and very convincing theory about the character of neoliberal labor (roughly from 1979 to today) in the massive and deeply researched 1999 book The New Spirit of Capitalism. By examining management literature, factory reports, and sociological studies over the period between 1965 and 1995, the authors of this work, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, determined that the shift from a form of industrial labor (1947-1975) to a form of post-industrial (service-oriented) labor (1979 to now) in high-income societies involved departing a critique of labor that was social in substance to one that's artistic in essence. Meaning, from one that was about job security to one about job autonomy.

There were two types of critiques waged at capitalism in the 20th century, argue Boltanski and Chiapello. One involved a social critique (better wages, fair distribution of wealth, pensions, and so on); the other was artistic, and this involved an attack on middle-class values and moral standardization. The artistic critique has its roots in the romantic movement of the 18th century Europe. It is this kind of artist (later in the modernist mode) who—as an free individual, as creative, as dreaming outside of the box—would challenge middle-class sensibilities and conformity (following orders, belief in the family, sticking with the program). This is the figure, the artist, the hippies pick up in the 1960s as their hero; and this is the figure that the new spirit of capitalism accepts as the model for a kind of labor system that emphasizes individual initiative and entrepreneurship. The security of the factory worker is dropped for the DIY autonomy of the working artist.

My argument, so, is this: The artist is the worst model for wage labor and also for citizenship, precisely because art is not fair. Art, however, happens to fit well with several aspects of the neoliberal conception of the world—a world that is defined by individual gifts and not by social obligations. This inherent unfairness in art proved, however, to be of use to an economic program that was itself justifying unfairness—in the form of inequality—and placing blame for inequality on individuals rather than the social mechanism for wealth distribution. As a consequence, the artist has become the enemy of democracy. As a consequence, we push the artist on our children not because we care about art but because we believe in the value of human capital, which, in our eyes, is all the more increased the more our children are like artists—the ideal figure (metaphor) for neoliberal labor.