A Prep Life

You may not know this, but there is a shortage of preparators in the art world

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There are many reasons why a shortage of preparators exists and it is somewhat abstract and hyperlocal. While a shortage may exist in small cities, it may not neccesarily exist in New York City or Los Angeles, cities with an overabundance of potential art workers.

But first off let’s define what a preparator is. For the uninitiated, a preparator is a very specific job title for positions that are associated with museums and galleries, and sometimes government and NGO’s (non-profit arts organizations). A preparator is an obscure job even within the art industry. It’s so obscure in fact that Microsoft Word does not recognize it as a real word and will auto-correct it to ‘preparatory’. The word doesn’t even exist on Google.

For decades preparators or preps were simply known as art handlers. That’s their colloquial name. What a prep is or does in layman’s terms is all the behind-the-scenes installation and preparation work of a typical museum or gallery. But it is not this simple. A prep isn’t just an installer of artworks, but if you can’t rig a 350 pound sculpture, hang a ten feet wide painting or frame a priceless print by Rembrandt, you better not apply for a prep’s job.

Not knowing or understanding what the term is, is actually the first reason why there is a shortage of preps. Most people simply don’t know that this job exists. Preps are tasked with jobs that would make ordinary people wince, so naturally the job comes with all sorts of weird perks, idiosyncrasies and comedic irony.

Back in 2010 Shane Caffrey inaugurated the first ever Art Handling Olympics, an art handling sporting competition of almost mythical proportions within prep lore. The Olympics included events like ‘How’s it Hanging’ where teams had to hang pictures of kitties as fast as possible, ‘Pack it Up’ where preps had to “wrap this trash we’re calling art we found at The Armory as fast as you can in bubble and cardboard”, ‘The Static Hold’ or holding steady a heavy painting made from lead and plywood as a curator yells about the prep’s incompetence and the coup de grace event ‘The Eliminator’ where preps were tasked to “read the artist’s mind and assemble!”

What separates the preps from the rest of the art professions is their understanding of the levels of absurdity within the industry. At the highest absurdist levels they operate as the de facto invisible labor without which none of the opulence and splendor would or could exist. They build the actual experiences not just for the audience, the museum visitors and the mythical ‘community’ that gets plastered all over every institutional mission statement, but for the donors, board members, collectors, and every sort of jet setting high flyer, yet they get little to no credit for any of it. The credit goes to the curators, the directors, and the donors. In modern jargon the preps are the one profession truly ‘erased’ or alienated from its labor and representation. Here we could side step into Bourdieu’s theory of capital in order to understand why this is the case, but I am saving that little bit of theoretical tedium for another story.

Another level of absurdity at play is money. I’ve been a prep for many years. I had Monet paintings worth millions of dollars wrapped in blankets in the back of my Toyota pick-up truck. I framed and handled hundreds of pictures, many of them worth more than the house in which I live. I prepared, moved and installed priceless antiquities from Greece, Egypt, Rome, China, Africa and South America. And I was paid just a little more than a fast food employee’s current starting wage to do it.

Now that I’m a curator, I can honestly say that preparators are one of the most underappreciated, underpaid, and under resourced workers at any art institution. This can also be said about registrars, museum guards and the facilities department (janitors, painters, etc). To be absolutely clear, all directors, curators, and administrators also feel this way about themselves, and they are not incorrect. The art industry is one of those weird spaces where money seems to be everywhere, yet very little of it trickles down to the people that do actual, on the ground work. And this includes the artists.

On the surface, a prep’s job is to make exhibitions, artists, galleries and museums look good. All the work is done on the back end where nobody can see what is happening behind the scenes.  Much of what goes on in the backrooms are trade secrets, shared only within the prep community, especially among trusted individuals. This gives everyone else the impression that exhibitions happen through a kind of magic. And there is a little magic to it. No exhibition is the same and everything that goes into producing and installing an exhibition is always brand new. This means that preps have to constantly be on their toes. There is a lot of planning and pre-planning, but the real work happens in real time, on the floor. This means that one can plan on installing a 150 pound digital art piece 25 feet in the air, but the details, the nitty gritty often gets decided on the fly. Mitigating risk, fixing mistakes, putting out fires and thinking of innovative ways to solve problems are a huge portion of a prep’s work during installations. Yet none of this can be seen, indeed ought not be seen, by the general public or the other employees. Things ought to just sort of happen. One day there is an empty room, the next day there are new walls and massive installations existing effortlessly in space. Magic.

And this is precisely the crux of the problem of the shortage of preparators. How can the industry expect to hire and retain qualified professionals when they cannot, or will not, pay them a decent wage? In the arts industry there is a massive disconnect between what the prep gets paid and what they ought to be paid. The disconnect is due in part to what I described above, the total ignorance of what a prep is or does. Preparation is a highly skilled profession. A prep must be able to perform as a carpenter, painter, electrician, framer, conservator, quantity surveyor, administrator, accountant, and registrar when necessary. And yet, in the great irony of the age, the prep’s salary range is lower than that of the carpenter, or the electrician, or the conservator. The irony is that to get a higher wage, the prep’s classification would have to be ‘upgraded’ to a painter or an electrician. Only a Principal Senior Preparator’s salary constitutes a living wage and that classification exists only for the most senior and accomplished of preps, the ones that end up running and managing the entire prep team.

By now you might be asking yourself, how can this be? The answer is actually simple. Human resources.

HR is the primary reason for the absurdity of the current institutional order. HR administrators know nothing about the jobs for which they hire, yet they set the salaries, write the job descriptions, and sit on search and hiring committees. For the preps, engaging with HR typically borders on a catch 22. HR sets wages based on data scoured from government employment agencies, which show a typical salary range for various tiers based on experience, but because HR sets the wages there is no other way to increase the salary range other than to go through HR. Because prep work is classified in a rather nebulous way, without professionalization stemming from institutional recognition, training or accreditation, HR’s approach is one of low expectations and outcomes.

Historically preps have been trained on the job. They come from the ranks of carpenters, painters and highly skilled laborers. Any good museum prep could build you a house from the ground up. But many preps are artists, performers, and academics with terminal degrees, MFAs, MAs, and PhDs. Their granular problem solving skills and love for the art trump any sort of mixed feeling about their poverty level wages. HR, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not, uses this as an opportunity to exploit preps and sets artificial barriers on their advancement, by setting wages too low or limiting working hours so they do not trigger the company’s health care and retirement systems. HR sets demands on prep positions that would be out of place everywhere else. Only in the art world would someone offer a $25 per hour highly skilled job that required minimum of five years of experience located in Southern California, one of the most expensive regions in the world.

And yet that is exactly what is happening. Even high school and university art teachers get more respect from HR. A big reason for this is that unlike in the world of preps, teachers have been professionalized. This means that they are able to command better wages and working conditions. Teacher unions have been able to argue for increased salaries and better working conditions. Most preps cannot utilize collective bargaining and institutions are actively discouraging unionization, if not outright banning it altogether. Just before 2020 efforts at unionization were made at art institutions like the Marciano Foundation where executives opted to shut down rather than allow a union to exist. When in 2021 art museums started to pay lip service to decolonization by hiring DEI consultants and setting up internal DEI committees and task force groups, the tacit agreement between management and workers was that such efforts would never lead to unionization. The rules were simple, diversify, equate, and include all you want, but do not ask for more money.

This is the last, but certainly not least, level of absurdity. While the art world has its mouth full with the latest progressive buzzwords, it is actively engaged in class-based economic segregation and colonization of the language and symbols of the poor and working class. And if it is not actively engaged in making the situation worse for the work force, it is at best ignoring its concerns, hoping that the ritualistic use of DEI language will exorcise the demons of class politics.

An exception to the order occurred in 2022 when the Filoli Historic House and Garden took the initiative to unionize its workers under the banner of DEI, citing pay equity as a major driver in their efforts. In the endless saga of largely performative decolonization of American art institutions, Filoli used modern diversity rhetoric to do something good for their employees. The Filoli logic posited that in the era of diversity, inclusion and equity, none of the stated goals of DEI politics could be accomplished without pay equity. Most people, especially the marginalized, understand this. Pay your employees a living wage and many problems will simply disappear, quoting Robert Reich who Tweeted “This is not complicated. If you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, you do not have a viable business model.” HR categorically rejects this logic, because its power is mandated by upper management who have an interest in keeping wages low for the financial health of the institutions they represent. This is an age old problem, because many art institutions are in the red and running massive deficits.

Ultimately the conversation about preps and art workers in general ought to be leaning in the direction of the dreaded word – professionalization. Low wages in the industry are not the result of the lack of skill or training, but by the willful misunderstanding by HR and management of the nature of the work. They want to see diplomas, degrees and certificates, in other words paper achievements. In today’s jobs marketplace paper achievements, stuffed CVs and curated buzzword-filled resumes rule supreme over any kind of actual experience or skills, and this makes work based around manual labor much harder to sell to potential employers who see their workforce not as people but as potential economic drivers and statistics to stuff their own ideological bags.  

For good or evil HR is here to stay. The goal is to win at their own game, in other words to change the data they use to set wages. There ought to be vocational schools, apprenticeship programs, and paid internships set up that teach prep skills and raise the bar and the wages. If unionization isn’t the way, perhaps the guild system could be a model to which art workers could look for professionalization and a kind of protection from the depredations of the market. These kinds of programs can be set up within art departments as standalone continuing education programs, or component parts of traditional Associate degrees, or as one time yearly recurring programs at museums, non-profits and government organizations. The important part is that these skills appear as legitimate alternatives to students looking for careers in the arts, with certificates and degrees waiting for them at the end.

Some starter programs already exist, like the DAP program at The Broad in Los Angeles, but its standards for wages are horrifyingly low, starting at only $19.50/hr, which in California is nowhere near even the bottom of middle class salary bracket. In fact, in California $19.50 is a poverty level wage. An applicant for the DAP could just as easily apply to work for In and Out Burger and get paid $20/hr. The minimum entry-level wage for preps ought to be in line with the standard living wage, but in reality it ought to be even higher because living wages often account only for the bare minimum of one’s needs. It follows then that wages for curators, registrars, support staff, facilities management, and guards ought to rise proportionally as well and narrow the wage gaps between manual and intellectual labor. Not everyone is going to like this arrangement, but that is part of the growing pains of an entire industry that ironically prides itself on being people and community-centered. Well, preps are part of the community along with the artists and the directors. What are we doing to make things right by them?