According to a recent survey of 42,000 employed Americans conducted by the career website Payscale — and illustrated with hilarious stock photographs by the Huffington Post — workers who identify as artists are the most likely to sleep with one of their co-workers, and the ones most likely to be on the lookout for potential mates at work.

Of course, among workers who topped the workplace hookup list — who include employees in profoundly unsexy fields like planning and expediting, industrial machinery operation, and welding — artists are also the ones with the most unconventional working conditions. They are also the only ones who may live at their workplace.

The survey notes that of responding artists, 8.3 percent said they had “hooked up” with a colleague, beating the runners-up, cooks, by .2 percent. Cooks were also the second-most-likely to be “on the prowl” at work, all of which suggests that the dating scene at Gordon Matta-Clark’s artist-run restaurant Food must have been exceptionally incestuous.

Another surprising revelation of the survey is its geographical component: Not one of the U.S.’s major art capitals figures on the list of the cities were workplace hook-ups are most widely reported, although Minneapolis came in at number six. The top three cities in the survey for workplace flings, in order, are Indianapolis, Memphis, and Grand Rapids, Wyoming. Those rankings may be misleading, however; it could just be that artists in New York and Los Angeles are better than their Midwestern colleagues at keeping their sexual collaborations with studio-mates secret.

(Also of note, though in no way relevant to art — unless you consider proper tooth care to be a form of high art, which, fair enough — is that dental hygienists beat out members of the clergy to top the survey’s list of the workers least likely to approve of office romance. )

— Benjamin Sutton

(Image: “Kiss” from Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s “The Joy of Sex,” 2005. Courtesy the artists.)

Tags: Benjamin Sutton, News, Payscale, Studio sex