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.