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.

[1] See Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 40.

[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.

[1] See, for example, Theodor Adorno and Anson Rabinbach, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique, no. 6 (Autumn, 1975): 12–19.