The Best Job in the World

The Best Job in the World brings together three artists, Cristina Garrido (Spain), Luis Gómez (Cuba/Spain), and Helena Martin Franco (Canada/Québec/Colombia), whose works examine the artist’s life across different contemporary socio-economic landscapes. Artistic careers are often lauded as prestigious, creative, and liberating; yet both experience—and popular perception— associate them with slim odds of success, poor pay, and highly unstable working conditions. So how true is the idea that being an artist is “the best job in the world,” a statement that both serves as the title of Cristina Garrido’s installation work and the exhibition itself? For whom is being an artist the best job in the world? Developed in collaboration with ENTRE, this group exhibition convenes practices that expose the costs of the neoliberal artist-entrepreneur and center solidarity, care, and mutual support as conditions for making artistic life viable.