Working Girl

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, in conversation with Sophia Giovannitti, author of Working Girl (Verso, 2023).

In 2021, Sophia Giovannitti was asked to participate in a virtual art show. The work would be exhibited on the NFT marketplace OpenSea and OnlyFans, and artists would be paid an $1,000 honorarium for their contribution. Giovannitti, a writer, artist, and sex worker, briefly thought about refusing to participate. OnlyFans, after all, bans content creators who solicit in-person meetings (presumably an effort to dissuade sex workers from using the platform). One thousand dollars also felt like very little—so little, in fact, that Giovannitti admitted to telling a curator she was sleeping with (unaffiliated with the show) that she was “being paid nothing.”

“I was told that the value I created [via my artwork] would create additional value for me, in the form of a future crypto sale,” Giovannitti wrote in Dirty Calculations, the video piece she submitted to the show. “My value-production was leveraged against the honorarium.” She later embedded the text in her performance-lecture series Scorpion, Frog (2023), which I saw in her Lower East Side studio in May.

Dirty Calculations sold for 2 ETH on December 9, 2021, when the price of 1 ETH was about $4,100. Half of the profits went to Giovannitti, the other half to the curator. Due to the fluctuating price of Ethereum, the piece today is worth less than half of what it originally sold for. Another artist, perhaps one cruising on the arbitrary whims and winds of the art market, might be disappointed in the sudden value downturn, a natural hazard when dealing with a fluctuating asset class like crypto. But for Giovannitti, it was yet another data point, another anecdote to harvest about money. “My work is about the movement of money and the mechanisms that shroud such movement,” she writes.

Her essay collection Working Girl, recently out with Verso, is a memoir and manifesto on selling art and sex—two inflated marketplaces that operate in affective parallels. Desire disguises the labor present in both art and sex work, allowing some participants to feign material transcendence, in spite of their transactional realities. “Art and sex, and the pained and pleasured fantasies spun around them, each have the power—possibly the unique power—to make one feel such a way: willingly, gorgeously, carefully annihilated,” Giovannitti writes in a section of the book “On Fantasy.”

I spoke with Giovannitti about compromises, the phrase “sex work” as euphemism, and the notion of selling yourself as an artist. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Terry Nguyen: I loved the contradictions you raised in Dirty Calculations, how it implicitly rejects purity in a world where we’re forced to make compromises. How did the idea come about?

Sophia Giovannitti: I realized I was making all these mental calculations that felt really gross to me whether to participate or not in the show. Will it benefit me or not? I mention this in the text, but it’s obviously fucked up that the curator came from an arms-dealing, art world family. I knew this, but I also wanted to show my work. I also had to consider whether this would affect my reputation. Will people think poorly of this curator because of his family, and would that affect me by association?

Dirty Calculations is one of my favorite pieces I’ve made. I think it’s successful as a standalone art piece, but I don’t think it does anything politically. It all revolves around me and my decision to participate. I ended up doing so because I liked the other artists involved, like Shu Lea Cheang, but I felt I had to make something quite meta. The result was quite an on-the-nose metaphor on the relationship between the art marketplace and the sex work world.

TN: Were you being facetious about how little you felt you were being paid?

SG: I believe that some of the proceeds from the show were going to be donated to a sex worker’s rights organization, so ultimately, I could just donate my payment to that. I actually use the figure of $1,000 in my work a lot. At my first solo show at Duplex, visitors had to pay $1,000 to enter the space and participate in Contract. It’s an interesting, round number. It’s a significant amount to most people, but no art really costs $1,000. In New York, it’s hard to get a room in an apartment for that amount. It’s also the standard “high end” hourly rate for an escort. I don’t literally think that $1,000 is nothing. I would love that money. But in the context of it being offered by a billionaire and payment for a piece? If I actually made a video piece that wasn’t just a text scroll, accounting for all the labor involved, it wouldn’t really cover it.

TN: In Scorpion, Frog, you mention that you first bought crypto to post an ad of yourself online. As an artist, your approach to crypto is quite neutral, I would say, in the sense that it is just another asset to you. What interests you about Web3 technology, in the context of both selling your art and your practice?

SG: I’ve developed a greater understanding for the possibilities of the internet, what can be done beyond intense corporate centralization. I liked how NFTs made the art world have explicit conversations around value and uniqueness and ownership. I found the hype around popular NFTs, like the Bored Apes, to be ugly and grotesque, but it’s not really different from what I see in the fine art world.

TN: I was really taken by the first section of Working Girl, in which you describe art and sex as occupying similar positions under capitalism. “Selling art has been likened to prostitution—to sell your art is to prostitute it—and both traffic in the ability to provoke a particular feeling in another person.” When did you first make this association?

SG: By virtue of being in the art world, I kept encountering these metaphors. “So-and-so is shilling for the market. This art star is prostituting themselves.” There’s this really good paper by Julia Bryan-Wilson called “Dirty Commerce.” It’s one of the best texts I’ve read about art workers and sex workers, and the relationship between the two labor movements in the 1970s. They’re very materially related, especially in a place like New York. The same people are buying expensive art and expensive sex. I’ve started to notice that I’m in this social milieu with other artists and writers who are also escorts or sugar babies. Or, they might have a rich partner or rich parents. What does it mean to move through these economies where there’s really no clarity as to how people are supporting themselves?

TN: Maybe this is because I’m tuned into online spaces where sex workers are more vocal, but I’ve noticed the term “sex work” is broadly applied, almost as a euphemism, to a range of labor roles, from escorting to soliciting nudes for money online (via OnlyFans) to pornography to prostitution. You don’t shy away from words like “whore” or “prostitute” How do you consider these distinctions in your work’s assessment of labor?

SG: The experiences I recount in Working Girl began in 2018, around the time when FOSTA-SESTA was passed. OnlyFans and its proliferation during the pandemic has really popularized the phrase “sex work.” It’s still surprising to me sometimes. I’m not precious about the words I use to describe my work. I also write this in the book, but I don’t want someone to insult me by calling me a whore. But they can also call me a sex worker in a really rude way. There’s this essay by Charlotte Shane, “Calling My Work What It Is,” and she says she prefers the term prostitute to escort. I found it really admirable.

For me, I use a lot of those words interchangeably. I think sex work is a useful umbrella term. When it became a phrase in the ‘70s, it was great in emphasizing the labor aspect in the phrase. That was such a problem for so long, that people didn’t consider it work. Now, I struggle with how it’s been subsumed into mainstream culture. People use “sex worker” to sound respectful, to signal how this is a job where workers should have protections and rights. That is all true, but it’s important to realize that many people who perform different aspects of sex work exist outside of the formal economy because they’re kept out of it or because they want to be. I don’t want it to be sanitized. Personally, I don’t know if I want sex work to be assimilated into “normal” life, nor should it.

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