This paper analyses artistic production and its relationship to contemporary discussions of immaterial labour. Central to this enquiry is the role professionalism plays in a range of conceptions of artistic subjecthood, and a growing need on the part of artists to optimise their working practices. It proposes that a founding narrative of 20th century avant-garde art, constructed around an artist’s disembodied labour and gestural agency, is increasingly vulnerable to instrumentalisation. This vulnerability is argued to be closely linked to shifts that have occurred in the Post-Fordist labour market more broadly, and is evident in the parallels that can be drawn between artistic labour and the precarity faced by other ‘cognitive’ workers. To carry out its analysis this text compares Alvin Toffler’s figure of the Prosumer, an individual whose activities blend aspects of production and consumption, to more recent accounts of working life offered by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Byung-Chul Han and McKenzie Wark. Here, it is suggested that a second conceptualising imperative can be identified in contemporary art. This is a tendency that is no longer radical in nature but rather operates in lockstep with the neo-liberal forces that shape government policy on cultural funding, and a growing trend towards self-management in artistic education.