The figure of the artist is often understood as a kind of curious prototype, a signifier of a specific imaginary of the cultural producer and their intended (often bohemian) lifestyle. Given that artists’ lives are typically defined in opposition to more conventional forms of employment, my thesis takes the treatment of the artist as a progenitor to the contemporary championing of the freelance worker. The freelance artist is supposedly no longer bound by the nuclear family or permanent fixed employment and is defined instead by flexibility and fluidity. I seek to outline the ways in which the image of ‘the artist’ both anticipates and is used to legitimise (even romanticise) a now ubiquitous form of precarious employment vis-à-vis a precarious space for living and working.

This thesis explores the studioification of the home, or rather the process in which both the home and life within the home (including creative work) are commodified. In doing so, it details how the alleged informality of artists’ living arrangements—often glamorised in visual representations of artists—is a mischaracterisation that naturalises the precarity of the artist. At the same time, it conceals the role of both the state and the real estate market in the making of such conditions. Historically, the state and the market have acted as agents to romanticise ‘the artist’ as a cultural and aspirational figure and their associated studios as ‘flexible’ and desirable spaces.

Beginning with the case of the birth of ‘the free artist’ during the two hundred year period when artists were in residence at the Louvre in Paris, I seek to highlight how the state laid the foundations for this new economic subject to emerge. The newly conceived condition of the free artist would come to constrict the life and work of the artist (and freelancers at large) to a new kind of precarious space: the artist’s studio. To uncover this inherent relationship between centralised power, the artist, and their ‘informal’ living arrangements, the thesis traces the development of the studio in Paris, New York, and San Francisco alongside its total permeation into contemporary living—not by chance, but by design. It exposes the instrumentalisation of the artist (as a figure) and of their studio (as a space) in commodifying a type of unrecognised labour that is justified by the studio’s characteristic lack of definition.

The thesis is organised chronologically in five chapters. It is neither a comprehensive history nor an attempt to trace a seamless genealogy of the artist’s studio or the studio as a typology. On the contrary, each chapter investigates a series of paradigms separated by time and place, identifying critical shifts in the process that I call studioification.