Working Girl
On Selling Art and Selling Sex
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The portrait of a young artist making both a living and a life
As a young artist trying to make a living in New York without sacrificing all her time to paying rent, Sophia Giovannitti turned to sex work: first, telling herself it was part of her art, and then quickly accepting it as simply the way to make the most money in the shortest possible time. Weaving between the art world and the sex industry, she learned how much the two markets have in common: both built on the buying and selling of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. The power of each lies in believing—or pretending—they can provide meaning outside of monetary exchange.
In this searching and provocative work, moving from the author’s own experiences to political analyses and the workings of the contemporary art world, Giovannitti asks how we might face the great dilemma of the art and sex industries head on: what happens to desire, beauty, creativity, and autonomy when everything is a transaction? Giovannitti finds a way to commit her life to art, to intimacy, and to freedom on her own terms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Performance artist Giovannitti's incisive debut memoir explores the intersection of art and sex work, and builds a case for destigmatizing the latter. "In the beginning of my working life, I felt that I wanted to find a patron, not a client, and I wanted to sell a performance, not sex," Giovannitti writes. Those ideals became complicated, though, as she started to observe the overlap between the two pursuits. After her first solo sex work negotiation, Giovannitti returned home and cried over "moving from girl to prostitute." But what is prostitution, she asks, and considers whether selling creative works, with their own investment of time, authenticity, and intimacy, is also a form of prostitution. "Just as prostitution is the oldest profession, this is the oldest metaphor," she writes of the links between sex and art. Giovannitti uses both her own art and the art of others, including digital artist Shawné Michaele Holloway, to bolster her analyses: "Enduring a man's efforts to push my boundaries is commonplace and boring... but taking pains to find such violations interesting gives us a way to live with them more easily. The same is true of confessional writing," she muses. Giovannitti's plainspoken explorations of controversial topics are sharp and stirring, and her provocative observations will prompt debate. This deserves to be grappled with.
