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.