Artist and art world wealthy Tom Sachs made headlines last month for a series of allegations about his demanding demands – and mistreatment – of employees. Sources shared their stories anonymously and Sachs’ studio denied most of the allegations, but the allegations nonetheless prompted several articles, including a Braked exposed this week and ignited social networks.
The saga began on February 16, when writer and curator Emily Colucci wrote an article on her website dirty dreams titled “Found It: The Worst Job Listing Ever Created”. The article described a job offer in which a “high-profile art world family” sought a full-time manager and personal assistant “dedicated to one simple goal: to make the couple’s life easier in every way possible.” The job required the candidate to be on call outside normal working hours and spelled out a long list of ridiculous tasks, including picking up clothes from “high-end stores”, serving as a point of contact for the fleet of personnel from couple’s house and manage “dog systems” and “closet systems”. On February 26, the New York Times picked up the story, and things just went on from there. Commentators on dirty dreams speculated that the employers were Sachs and his wife, former Gagosian Gallery director Sarah Hoover, an assumption also later reported by clean art.
The collective fascination with the history of Sachs’ studio culture reveals a morbid curiosity around abuse – especially when it occurs in an industry whose public image is largely one of wealth and glamour. – and a disturbing normalization of this behavior. On BrakedIt is instagram after the story was published, the comments ranged from poking fun at Sachs to mocking his workers to half-baked defenses of the artist in the spirit of turmoil culture. Many comments also reference external impressions and stereotypes about the toxicity of the art world and allude to the systemic issues that allow it to endure.
Allegations reported by Brakedmany of them taken over by former workers Hyperallergic spoken, include Sachs’ strict rules requiring studio employees to observe various bizarre manners, such as walking quietly, placing objects at parallel and 90-degree angles, and adhering to a strict diet and exercise routine that involved group workouts while wearing uniforms; but also his throws on or near his employees: a sheet of steel, a piece of wood, a typewriter, clipboards, a ladder.
As for the sources who spoke to brakedthe workers Hyperallergic interviewees requested anonymity, citing non-disclosure agreements and fear of reprisal. While the accusations against Sachs are alarming, individuals’ fear of reporting this kind of abuse – even when no longer employed by Sachs – is also disturbing and suggests more widespread issues in the cultural sphere. (If you have a history of unfair or abusive treatment in the art world, you can contact advice@hyperallergic.com.)
In its title, the braked the article half-jokes that Sachs “promised a fun cult”, but a former employee said Hyperallergic that this concept was not what attracted workers to space – they were looking for a real professional opportunity. Another said they didn’t know anything about Sachs when they started the work and just hoped it might help them become an artist. “Now that I’ve been in art for longer, I know that’s not true, but he chooses young people who think it’s true,” the former employee said.
“We wanted a job in the arts for someone we admired to some degree. Some people were more fans of his art than others,” the other worker said. “But no one signed up for that.” While the former employee mentioned the hordes of Sachs superfans (mostly young, white males), they said the people who actually ran the studio didn’t fall into that category. Some employees had worked there for 10 or 12 years, they added, but Sachs had managed to create a culture of fear and silence.
“I think it happened because you become indoctrinated and you start to believe that the abuse that Tom is committing is normal and that’s how a normal studio should operate,” they said. “And then these people start perpetuating this abuse.” Inter-worker communication about Sachs’ behavior, they added, was difficult.
“You certainly couldn’t bring anything,” the former employee said. “And the longer you stayed, the more it felt like a normal work environment.”
The other former worker said Hyperallergic how hard it was to quit.
“It’s like a real cult in that it’s very hard to leave,” they said, citing “manipulation and threats.”
“They were telling you things like, ‘You wouldn’t get any kind of reference letter, Tom would never mention your name again, all the work you’ve done here would be for naught, no one would remember you, and everything. the world would speak ill of you,” the worker said.They added that Sachs repeatedly spoke negatively about his former workers.
In his artistic practice, Sachs sometimes conveys a fixation on space travel, as shown in his 14-year-old project Space program, a series of large-scale interactive installations in which he depicts astronauts and rockets. The former worker said Hyperallergic that he also brought this obsession (or perhaps a performative aesthetic) to his real-life studio, claiming that Sachs told employees they had to be physically fit to travel in space.
“He didn’t call any of his performances ‘performances,’ and we weren’t allowed to call them performances. We had to call them protests, and you had to believe what he believed, which was that you were actually going to space,” the ex-employee said. “If you used the wrong language, it was punishable because it showed you weren’t completely indoctrinated in the way of thinking the studio operated on.”
An employee who broke a rule should donate money to a piggy bank, but the former worker said the punishment also involved verbal harassment. Braked lists Sachs’ weird and specific personal needs – like demanding a dish of “rabbit, sweet potato, julienned spinach, cranberry powder, aloe vera juice and coconut oil” for his dog to be prepared three times a day. day – and recounts cases of abuse and insults.
“You had no idea what he was going to do with that pent up rage,” the former employee said. Hyperallergic. “If he was going to kick or throw something, and I was really scared.”
“Everyone knows their footprints there,” said another former worker Hyperallergic employees in the basement studio. “To prepare for him to come down the stairs.”
Other stories center on Sachs’ alleged inappropriate sexual behaviors: he is said to have watched pornography in the studio, talked about his sexual preferences, worn tight underwear in the workplace, and made a employee did not feel safe being alone with him.
“He treated the men so differently. Men had the potential to be his proteges,” the former employee said. Hyperallergic. “He didn’t see women that way.” Sachs also reportedly called a basement storage room the “rape room” (he later renamed it the “consent room” and Braked reported that his studio said the names were meant to be a joke). The other former employee said Hyperallergic that Sachs had a box labeled “asbestos” and containers labeled “formaldehyde”. They said they had never seen the artist use either material in a project.
Sachs became known for his stunts that could be interpreted as provocative (for example, the Jewish artist repeatedly depicted swastikas in his works and even displayed one in the dining room of his studio). But even before the outpouring of revelations in recent weeks, Sachs himself was never shy about describing his studio environment as a cult, a characterization largely overlooked as just one more aspect of his quirky artistic practice. In a 2022 New York Times piece by Andrew Russeth who praised Sachs’ work as representing “what people can achieve when they come together”, the artist is oddly quoted as saying, “A cult just means – when you look for it – that simply means a group of people with idiosyncrasy and shared values… Everyone is welcome to leave whenever they wish. Sachs even publicly described his outlandish demands for employees in a 2010 film titled ten ballsand he also provided his workers with a more detailed manual, according to Braked.
Neither Sachs’ studio, nor his New York galleries Acquavella and Sperone Westwater, nor Nike, with which the artist maintains a relationship long-standing partnershipresponded to Hyperallergicrequest for comment. A spokesperson for the artist said braked that “Tom Sachs Studio believes that all employees should feel safe in their workplace and is committed to upholding these values.”
But the former employee said Hyperallergic that “Tom was extremely serious about everything that came out of his mouth and everything that he wrote”, as the employee handbook. They added that calling the “rape room” a joke gives Sachs an easy way out. “It didn’t feel like a joke to the employees, it all felt really real,” they said.
“Similar to the swastika in the dining room, they were ways for him to exert his power in the studio because you weren’t allowed to have a contrary opinion,” they continued. “You had no right to say ‘this makes me uncomfortable’ because then you weren’t part of the gang, easy going, part of the studio. You just had to act like you didn’t mind. braked also described a patronage system in which Sachs gave his favorite employees expensive gifts and constantly reminded his employees that they were replaceable.
On social networks, comments on brakedThe article reveals how familiar Sachs’ alleged behavior was to readers both outside but especially inside the art world. Despite the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s studio environment, the story reminded people of their own encounters with cultural figures whose public facade belies a psychologically manipulative personality and exploitative tendencies.
Artist Bobby Aiosa weighed in with a damning condemnation of how big-name entertainers treat others. “Successful artists can be complete asses who treat studio staff like disposable labor,” Aiosa wrote. “The lack of humanity is disgusting.”
