Kenneth Rogers examines the inflated global art markets,which are inextricably bound to and dependent upon more informal market systems that operate through the spontaneous organization of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and ultimately undervalued forms of labour. This article contextualizes the function of labor within two contrasting historical traditions/tendencies of art and cultural production that explicitly reference labour as an essential structuring condition of the work. The debate is developed through a detailed case study of an exchange between two contemporary media/video artists, Juan Devis and Yoshua Okon, both based in Los Angeles. The case study demonstrates the complexities of how the market value of art is implicated within a precarious transnational wage labor system in the neoliberal global economy.