Why don’t people tip art workshop leaders?

And why am I asking this question?

Yeah, I’ve got a tip for you buddy…the tip of my beak… (Photo: Author)

My wife, Diana, leads art workshops.

Diana works for weeks, sometimes months to prepare for each workshop. She plasters posters all over town, talks up her workshops on social media, sends emails to past workshop participants and encourages people she meets on the street to attend her workshops. She buys supplies, secures a location and writes up and designs handout materials.

Diana is careful to set a workshop registration cost participants will find reasonable, knowing most of the money she collects will be used to pay for facility rentals, supplies, snacks and insurance. It would be nice to charge enough to cover all the work she does, but if she did, few people would pony up the money.

By the time the workshop starts, Diana is exhausted and a ball of anxiety, doubting her ability to do anything vaguely artistic, never mind leading an art workshop. She questions her ability as an artist, questions the life choices that led her to the workshop room, even questions her own name.

The miracle of teaching

When the workshop gets underway, though, a minor miracle occurs. Diana leads her workshops with authority and makes the experience fun and fulfilling for all participants, even those who have never painted before. Sometimes there are difficult participants — at least one in every workshop¹ — and she handles those people with grace and patience, making sure their contrary attitudes don’t affect the other participants.

At the end of the workshop, Diana thanks everyone for coming, tells them they have done a great job and asks them to get in touch if they want any advice on continuing to work on the painting they have created. She smiles and laughs and encourages until the last participant has left.

And then Diana collapses — utterly collapses — her energy completely spent, the hollow shell of a woman all that remains.

But the work is not done. Now Diana must clean up the workshop room, a process that mysteriously takes longer than it took to set up the room. Somehow the boxes of supplies seem heavier, even though many of the supplies have been used up during the workshop.

Finally, Diana heads home, fighting to keep her eyes open. At this point, it’s best for her to have a designated driver. She isn’t intoxicated, but she is impaired. With fatigue. But also a growing, warm sense of satisfaction that the workshop is over. Once again, she has pulled it off.

Coffee, pastry, tip

Now, contrast that to what the guy at our local coffee shop does. He pours a drip coffee, ignoring our request to leave no room for cream. Rings up a pastry I have taken from the cabinet and trotted up to the counter. Wordlessly passes me the terminal for payment. The first thing I’m faced with is a screen asking for a tip, minimum 15 per cent.

Why? Why are some jobs automatically “tip worthy?” Why is my wife’s labour not seen as worthy of a tip? Especially since the knowledge she has shared with her students will last much longer and affect their lives more deeply than a cup of coffee and a pastry.

Why are some efforts rewarded with tips and others are not?

For a long time, the explanation has been that we tip servers because they receive low hourly pay — in many cases, no more than minimum wage (which, where I live, is about $18 an hour). The tips help these low-paid workers make a more reasonable living.

But if that’s the case, why do we tip some workers and not others, when all of them must receive at least the minimum wage²? We tip servers in restaurants, but we don’t tip janitors. We tip hairdressers but we don’t tip the mechanics who work on our vehicles. We tip tour guides, but we don’t tip the salespeople in clothing stores, some of whom work with us for hours to put together outfits. We tip the takeout food delivery driver, but we don’t tip the Amazon delivery driver.

And although people who work in creative fields — photographers, painters, musicians, writers — rarely receive the minimum wage (unless they work for a company that must pay the minimum wage), their work is almost never rewarded with tips.³ Granted, it’s their choice to work in these historically low-paying fields and we don’t owe them a living for their work. But why do we assign creative work such little value? Especially when, paradoxically, the products of creative work can be so valuable?⁴

I don’t have a good answer. I’m still exploring these ideas. But I certainly wish someone — anyone — would recognize the hard work my wife does when she leads art workshops with even a small tip. She’s never asked for one, but she sure deserves it.

Notes:

1. It’s beyond me why anyone would pay to take part in an art workshop, then refuse to paint the subject the workshop is based on or use the techniques the leader is teaching. But it happens more often than you might think. It’s like buying a ticket to Mission Impossible and complaining it isn’t Gone With The Wind.

2. I’m basing this on the rules in Canada, where (with the exception of Quebec), all workers, including those who receive tips, must be paid at least the minimum wage. I understand that is not the case in some other jurisdictions. I don’t believe that invalidates my observation that some jobs are deemed worthy of tips and others are not.

3. I can see it making sense to tip a busker or other street performer. But what they are getting is not a tip, per se. It is payment for entertainment.

4. Take, for example, Comedian, the banana duct-taped to a wall created in 2019 by artist Maurizio Cattelan. One edition of Comedian sold at auction for USD $6.2 million. Do you suppose Cattelan asked for a tip when he sold it?