I was invited recently by my colleagues at the IU Arts Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab to contribute to a monograph they are editing on “Cultural Entrepreneurship” in the Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship series. To my surprise, and I think theirs, I said yes. Despite my demanding “day job” I now find myself at my desk overlooking the East River poring through the literature on arts incubators since 2014 when I published a typology of arts incubators. My contribution to the monograph will include a review of this literature along with an update on the status of the 46 arts incubators included in my 2014 typology and attendant inventory. Given all that’s going on the world – and right up and down the street from here – spending the day just doing research feels like a vacation!
I’m teasing out the opening paragraphs of each of the ten essays in Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action. Interested in reading more than the first paragraphs? You can order directly in the US from University of Chicago Press, in the UK from Intellect Books, ask your local bookstore to order it for you, or purchase from a giant online retailer. Essay Three is probably the most “academic” or “theoretical” in the collection, but no prior knowledge is required.
Essay Three: Art, Capitalism, and Its Discontents
When one looks at the intersection of “arts and business” or “arts and entrepreneurship,” the terms “industry” and “industries” rear their heads. Famously critiqued by Theodor Adorno and others, the products of the culture “industry” are, according to him, commodities only, in which laborers produce or distribute mechanical reproductions of cultural artifacts.[1] According to this school of thought, the financial value of the products of the culture “industry” is harvested not by the creator or the audience, but by a third party. This essay, and this book as a whole, is about removing that third party, about transferring aesthetic and cultural value from the artist directly to the audience who co-create the work’s meaning through their experience of it. While intermediaries can, do, and often should exist, artists who maintain control of the production and distribution of their work can transcend the industrial commodification of their creative output. Ultimately, I intend to uncover the ways in which arts entrepreneurship is an action that does not necessarily rely on the capitalist economic system as it has developed since the time of Adam Smith, a system that relies on the separation of capital from labor.
Capitalism, as it has been understood since the middle of the nineteenth century, relies on the separation of capital (the owner) and labor (the worker). But what may be true of a pin factory, doesn’t map cleanly onto the production and subsequent distribution of art. Unlike traditionally capitalist enterprises as they developed in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, as entities separate from the households of their owners,[1] the arts entrepreneurship enterprise is inseparable from the artist themself. Bourdieu explains this paradox as the “site of a struggle” between the principles of hierarchy (of capital over labor) and of autonomy.[2] To varying degrees, the artists I interviewed and observed embody this struggle between their autonomous motivation to create and the institutional structures—be they galleries, nonprofit organizations, or grantmakers—that have developed around the creative practice of artists–at times to support them, but at other times to exploit them. Some of these organizations have put services in place both within and outside the capitalist system in order to help artists make work and thrive from doing so.
[2] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: the Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia U Press, 1983), 40.
I’m teasing out the opening paragraphs of each of the ten essays in Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action. Interested in reading more than the first paragraphs? You can order directly in the US from University of Chicago Press, in the UK from Intellect Books, ask your local bookstore to order it for you, or purchase from a giant online retailer. I do so now, with some trepidation, as I know that AI bots can pull this language and subsequently write something in “my” voice. But, unless I decide to unpublish this whole site, which would be antithetical to its purpose, I may as well continue….
Essay Two: Motivation, Symbolic Meaning, and Social Impact
At a presentation I gave to a group of artists in a gallerist’s home, I repeated a refrain I have both heard and spoken for years: You don’t become an artist in order to make money because there are much easier ways to do that. One of the artists in the space vehemently pushed back against this idea. “If being an artist is what I’m best at and I can make money, then I’m going to make money from my art.” “Yes,” I replied, “you can and should make money from your art, but is that really what motivates you to make the art?”1 All of the artists I interviewed for this book make money from their art, some quite a lot, but none point to making money as their motivation or even their intent. Instead, artists talk about making work that is meaningful (to themselves and others) and impactful. This essay explores the concept of meaning, who creates it and for whom, and how the impact of that meaning is defined and evaluated.
Over the next weeks, I’ll be teasing out the opening paragraphs of each of the ten essays in Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action. Interested in reading more than the first paragraphs? You can order directly in the US from University of Chicago Press, in the UK from Intellect Books, ask your local bookstore to order it for you, or purchase from a giant online retailer.
Essay One: An Ouroboros of Self-sustainability
The Ouroboros as Metaphor
Artists thrive when they can sustain their creative practice and their creative practice can sustain them. I explain this relationship between the artists and the creative infrastructures that make their work possible by using the visual metaphor of the ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail. The ouroboros efficiently describes this relationship between art and business or rather the relationship between art and money. The ouroboros shifts the commonly held perspective on the relationship between art and money, which suggests that art “sells out” to follow money. The ouroboros reverses that perspective: Art is the head; money is the tail following at the end, while also feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism— the artist— not only to survive but also to thrive. Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. I employ a pragmatic concept of creative innovation: a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For is that not what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact? Entrepreneurship can be understood as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into money, so that the money can be reinvested in the artist and the making of more art. But at its very essence, it is even simpler than that: Arts entrepreneurship connects art with audience.
“…a remarkable book that, over 196 pages, thoughtfully discusses and demystifies the key issues that make frequent appearances in the burgeoning discourse of arts entrepreneurship as both a scholarly field and creative praxis.”
“Essig integrates her dramaturgical lens and training in stakeholder theory to analyze both contextual and behavioral constructs of arts entrepreneurship phenomenon through the following questions: What is the economic, social, and cultural context for arts entrepreneurship? Who are stakeholders of arts entrepreneurship, and what role do they play in both the phenomenon and discourse of arts entrepreneurship? How are artists and other stakeholders situated and motivated to take action? How can the arts sector and the late-capitalist world be transformed for and through arts entrepreneurship? Most importantly, how do the power dynamics shape the narrative of arts entrepreneurship and the transforming arts sector?”
and my favorite: “I found this book an intellectual delight for scholars, teachers, and artists who want to develop a systemic and comprehensive understanding of arts entrepreneurship as an academic field; a social, economic, and cultural phenomenon; or simply a term full of controversies and possibilities.”
*full disclosure: I am on the editorial board of Artivate but did not participate in any way in the solicitation or editing of this review or any other articles or reviews in the current issue.
Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action is now available online or, maybe, at a bookstore near you if you ask for it. Please do. I started these essays in 2017, but many of the ideas first found the light of day on this blog, which launched December 31, 2010. Many thanks to all of you who read, commented, contributed, agreed to be interviewed, or just made good work. Enjoy!
It has become my annual ritual for the past 11 years to write a New Year’s Eve blog post, celebrating the launch of Creative Infrastructure on December 31, 2010. But let’s face it – blogs are so last decade…or maybe even the decade before. Both my blogging (this is only the fifth post of the year) and the readership have declined significantly this year (down to about 9000 from a high of over 200,000 in 2014).
Nevertheless, there were some very important milestones and transitions during 2021 worth noting. Quite unexpectedly, I left Los Angeles to return to New York to assume a new position as provost of Baruch College (CUNY). While on its surface this wasn’t because of the pandemic, can any transition in 2021 not have been affected by the pandemic?
Most noteworthy for readers of this blog, was the publication of Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action. Many of the ideas in the book first saw the light of day here on the Creative Infrastructure blog. I started thinking about the book when I developed the ouroboros as a metaphor for arts entrepreneurship for a talk I gave in 2014 and began writing it in earnest in 2017. Despite working full time as an academic dean during the first year of pandemic, there was something about being sequestered and isolated at home that enabled me to finish it. I was working through the essays late in 2020 when I went to pick up the thread on “the next one” only to realize that I had indeed drafted all of them. So off it went to the publisher, from there to the reviewers, and back to me and then the copyeditor, layout editor and so on.
Author copies arrived earlier this month!
I hope you’ll read it – I poured my heart into it (as well as some real scholarship).
I want to acknowledge those who helped along the way, in this selection from the Prologue:
I am grateful to those interviewed: Jesse Armstrong, Betty Avila, Aaron Landsman, Larron Lardell, Lauren Lee, Sharon Louden (who also introduced me to editor Tim Mitchell), William Powhida, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Gregory Sale, Sarah Sullivan, Beth Ames Swartz, Clifton Taylor, Carlton Turner, Xanthia Walker, and Laura Zabel. These fifteen artists appear throughout the essays. They have been making a living and a life in the arts for five years or fifty, some part of an arts organization and others on their own; I thank them profusely for sharing their time with me and their talents with the world. The interview with Ed Marquand excerpted in Essay Nine was conducted in 2014 as part of a research project entitled “Value Creation by and Evaluation of Arts Incubators.”
The arts entrepreneurship learning journey that began in 2005 was informed by numerous colleagues and artists whom I met along the way through both professional conferences and chance social interaction. I listened to them as well, and they taught me much. Some who have had particular influence on the essays in this book are Kim Abeles, Kiley Arroyo, Laurie Baefsky, Jamie Bennett, Danielle Brazell, Bob Booker, Paul Bonin- Rodriguez, John Borstel, Adrienne Callander, Tom Catlaw, Woong- Jo Chang, Shelley Cohn, Jennifer Cole, Jaime Dempsey, Alexandre Frenette, Jonathan Gangi, Ruby Lopez Harper, Liz Lerman, Bronwyn Mauldin, Porsche McGovern, Jacob Meders, Tim Miller, Ian David Moss, Lauren Pacheco, Mark Rabideau, Diane Ragsdale, Esther Robinson, Michael Rohd, Rey Sepulveda, Gordon Shockley, E. Andrew Taylor, Neville Vakharia, Tatiana Vahan, Scott Waters, Jason White, Margaret Wyszomirski, and the late Sherry Wagner Henry. There are many more; I apologize if your name isn’t included here. During this same period, I launched the Creative Infrastructure blog, from which this collection gets its name and where I worked through many of the ideas that follow. I am grateful for the interactions I have had there with readers, especially Carter Gilles, whose questions and comments, while usually challenging, were always quite thoughtful. My graduate students at ASU have helped me to clarify and articulate my thinking by asking really smart questions. Joanna Guevara and Mollie Flanagan deserve special thanks for their coauthorship of several reports and studies. Some of these were developed with support from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, whose arts program manager, Heather Pontonio, has been an influence on me and the field.
Upon leaving ASU in 2018, I became dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Cal State LA. I thank Lynn Mahoney, José Luis Alvarado, Jose Gomez, and President Bill Covino for their support of this project. Special thanks go to my assistant, Flora Saavedra- Hernandez, who helped me to carve a few hours a week (some weeks) out of an otherwise packed calendar.
Finally, thank you to my children, Simon and Monica, who grew into adulthood while I was learning, and to my loving partner Glenn, who has admirably sustained his own creative practice as a lighting designer for over thirty years.
I wanted to provide an update for my readers who have been following the progress of my book, Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action.
After some delay, I received a positive reader report from the publisher, Intellect Books. It was all one could hope for: thoughtful and constructive, with a conclusion to “publish with minor revisions.” Those revisions are now underway especially in response to the reader’s suggestion that I address race, class, and equity more directly. It is great feedback that provides a foundation for the revisions I am making now.
In short, all is on track for publication later this year!
Creative Infrastructure 