From the financial crisis that hit the global economy in 2008 and the subsequent austerity measures, to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, art workers have been on the spotlight as a particularly impacted sector. In Portugal, the sector's structural precarity, that had always existed, based on project work, has been chronically exposed, also raising the visibility of non-creative professionals in the art worlds (mediators, operators, technicians). On the private sector side, some reference cultural institutions took advantage of the crises to advance neoliberal agendas of cuts and dismissals. Before the absence of government response to a sector comprised mainly by independent and informal workers, arts professionals started an unprecedented and persistent process of organizing for claiming urgency measures addressing their basic survival needs, but also a consistent policy and statute for the sector, which would be approved at the end of 2021, though considered "disappointing". This paper will discuss the changes happening in the Portuguese art worlds from two main standpoints: (1) the role of the State in the (de)regulation and (de)professionalization of the sector; and (2) the ways arts professionals have been organizing to cope with precarity and crisis, namely through collective organization. This reality is taken as a case to analyze how the projectification of work is interlinked with the multiple dysfunctions and inequities of contemporary capitalism.

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