My undergraduate arts entrepreneurship class had its first meeting Tuesday, during which the students and I discussed the nature of entrepreneurial action.  Then they went off on their own to read the first chapter of Ann Bogart’s “And Then, You Act” and Barry Hessenius’s interview with Aaron Dworkin so that they could comment on our online discussion forum about what it means to be an “arts entrepreneur,” an actor in the cultural space.   The theme of “passion” ran, hmmm, passionately through their responses.  To summarize what they said, I aggregated their text, removed the names “Bogart,” and “Dworkin” and the word “entrepreneursip” to create the word cloud below, which again evidences that arts entrepreneurship keeps art and passion at its center. The writing prompt was as follows:

In our first class session, we discussed the nature of entrepreneurial action. In the first week’s reading, Anne Bogart discusses the artist as a cultural actor (i.e. one who undertakes “action”) and Aaron Dworkin serves as an example of such a cultural actor.  Combine these two concepts to describe what it means to be an “arts entrepreneur.”  There is no one right or wrong answer to this question, although some answers may be better than others – you’ll decide which in the context of in-class discussion.