Do Artists Need Unions?

“Maybe unions or artists’ guilds can serve and protect an embattled creative class. With musicians typically operating without record labels, journalists increasingly working as freelancers as newspapers shed staff, and book publishing beginning what looks like a period of compression, unions might take some of the risk and sting out of our current state of creative destruction.”

Sergei Filin And The Complex, Terrible Society Of The Bolshoi

“Sometimes an institution has an uncanny way of embodying the society to which it belongs. … So it is at the pinnacles of Russian dance. Since the nineteenth century, the country’s two principal stages–the Mariinsky, in St. Petersburg, and the Bolshoi, in Moscow–have acted as microcosms of imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and, now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”