Creative Infrastructures

Linda Essig

Description

Creative Infrastructures is a new collection of connected essays that examines the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship and money. Essig uses her extensive knowledge of the field of arts entrepreneurship and puts it to broader practical use and greater impact by offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means over ends. Essig uses illustrative case studies to show how her theoretical framework explains a number of innovative efforts in culturally and racially diverse communities. 

The Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is a visual metaphor deployed by Essig in the opening essay to shift commonly held perspectives on, especially, the relationship between art and money. Art is the head; money is the tail, feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism to not only survive but also thrive.

Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is understood to be a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For that is what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact. Entrepreneurship is conceived of as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into capital (financial and other types) that can be re-invested in the artist and the making of more art. This book endeavours to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question 'How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?'

Other essays in the collection consider a range of topics including how aesthetic and cultural value are transmitted from the artist to the audience; the complexity of the tension between what art fundamentally is and the reproduction of that work and the recent foregrounding of the idea that art can produce positive social change – through current and late-twentieth-century trends in 'social impact art' or 'art for change'.

As in sports, business and other sectors, the star artists, the top 1 per cent, have disproportionately influenced the public expectations for what 'a successful artist' means. It isn’t necessary to retell the stories of the one per cent of arts entrepreneurs; instead Essig looks instead at the quotidian artist, at what they do and why, not what they make. All too often, artists who are attentive to the 'business' of their creative practice are accused of 'selling out'. But for many working artists, that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive, but to thrive. When artists follow their mission, Essig contends that they don’t sell out, they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront.

The closing essay is a work of speculative fiction, based in all that comes before, both in the preceding essays and in Essig’s work as an artist, arts advocate and scholar of cultural policy. Returning to the symbol of the Ouroboros, it connects the head (art) to the tail (not money specifically, but resources), and back again. It is a 'future imaginary', in which she profiles three fictional artists in the year 2050.

The field of arts entrepreneurship is growing – thanks in large part to the work of Linda Essig. The case studies in the book are US-based, but the issues addressed are universal.

This book is ideal for use in training programmes for arts administrators and advocates; policy analysts and business schools that are looking to add in arts programmes. It will be of great interest and significance to people working in the cultural industries in the United Kingdom and Europe, especially Germany, where there has also been some recent research interest on similar topics.

It is also relevant to the many artists who participate in training and professional development programmes in their community, as well as those who are just starting out.

 

Prologue

Essay One: An Ouroboros of self-sustainability 

Essay Two: Motivation, symbolic meaning, and social impact 

Essay Three: Art, capitalism, and its discontents 

Essay Four: Novelty, uniqueness, originality 

Essay Five: Making way for impact 

Essay Six: The nature of (arts) entrepreneurial action 

Essay Seven: Being an entrepreneurial artist 

Essay Eight: Eschewing scarcity and finding abundance 

Essay Nine: Buying up, not selling out 

Epilogue: A future imaginary 

Bibliography 

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• Politics
• Artist's book
• Entrepreneurship
• Artists' Books
• Essays

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789385731
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Creative Infrastructures
Creative Infrastructures

Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action
Linda Essig
Essays 2017–2020
First published in the UK in 2022 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Tanya Montefusco
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Typesetting: Newgen
Print ISBN 978-1-7893-8571-7
ePDF ISBN 978-1-7893-8572-4
ePub ISBN 978-1-7893-8573-1
Printed and bound by Short Run.
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Prologue
Essay One: An Ouroboros of Self-Sustainability
The Ouroboros as Metaphor
The Approach
Defining Terms: Art, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Money
Given Conditions: The Late-Capitalist Economy
Language and Ideology
The Players
The Action
Denouement
Essay Two: Motivation, Symbolic Meaning, and Social Impact
Symbolic Meaning and Identity Expression
Experience and the Co-Creation of Meaning
Economies of Art
Meaning, Impact, and Its Assessment
Yes, and …
Here, Now
Essay Three: Art, Capitalism, and Its Discontents
The Hierarchy of Capital
Labor Control of the Means of Production
When the Creative Industries “Work”
Scale and Value
Is Capitalism “Smart?”
Essay Four: Novelty, Uniqueness, Originality
Individuals Making Multiples
Organizations: Museum Stores and Artist Retail
Copyright and Its Discontents
The Innovation Narrative
Essay Five: Making Way for Impact
Art for Change
Theory of Change
“Measuring” Social Impact
Guidelines for Evaluation
From Innovation to Impact
Essay Six: The Nature of (Arts) Entrepreneurial Action
Introduction
Entrepreneurial Action in the Arts
Intermediaries for Entrepreneurial Action
The Elephant in the Room: Why (Some) Artists Hate the Word “Entrepreneur”
Essay Seven: Being an Entrepreneurial Artist
What Does It Mean to Be an Entrepreneurial Artist?
Profile: Clifton Taylor, Lighting Designer
Profile: Daniel Bernard Roumain, Composer and Performer
The Idea of the “Portfolio Career”
Being Entrepreneurial through Collective Action
Entrepreneurship as Art
Success (?)
Essay Eight: Eschewing Scarcity and Finding Abundance
Abundance
Scarcity and Precarity
Overcoming Scarcity and Precarity with Entrepreneurial Creativity
Is There a Policy Answer?
Essay Nine: Buying Up, Not Selling Out
Individual Artists
Organizations
Communities, Markets, and Capital Flow
Supporting Resilience
Epilogue: A Future Imaginary
Bibliography
Prologue
When I was in my late twenties, with a natural tendency toward risk aversion mediated by my first steady teaching gig and not yet having the parental responsibilities I would have several years later, I decided to get a private pilot’s license. My most vivid memories of flying lessons are of stall training. In this exercise, the instructor cuts the engine and the student pilot is told to climb … and climb … and climb, until the plane slows to the point that there is not enough air pressure under the wings to hold it aloft and the plane—with student pilot and instructor inside—literally begins to fall out of the sky. The pilot’s job is to recover control of the plane by lowering its “angle of attack” and then restart the engine before it enters an unrecoverable spin or loses too much altitude (i.e. falls out of the sky).
There are undoubtedly pilots-in-training who enjoy that feeling of loss of aeronautic control and the accompanying adrenaline rush that happens just as the plane hits its stall point, but in me it instilled only fear; it was not a pleasant feeling at all. I started each lesson dreading the inevitable stall drill. Hitting the stall, the fear kept me focused on the recovery. I was drilled on this maneuver over and over again to the point where muscle memory and alert decision-making were in sufficient equilibrium to pass my flight test.
The closest I’ve felt to that feeling at the top of the climb is now, in this current economic moment. The capitalist economic system that was birthed, like our country, in the Enlightenment, has been climbing and climbing and climbing, but with that climb, the pilots have grown further and further away from all the folks on the ground. (To be clear, I am one of the folks on the ground in this analogy.) It feels like the economy that has generated the lift to keep the proverbial plane in the air is thinning; my stomach tells me we are on the edge of that aeronautical stall, that loss of control. Of course, my gut is not a particularly reliable source for economic forecasting, but there are plenty of actual economists and other writers who have deemed the inevitable inequities and capital concentration of our current moment to be unsustainable.
By the time I started this collection of essays, I had begun to think that I had been complicit in the neoliberal run-up to this stall point, supporting individual artists to “be more entrepreneurial in their creative practice.” When I first conceived of this project, before Brexit, before Trumpism, its overriding metaphor was of an ouroboros, a serpent nourished by its tail. Today, it is as much an explanation for my own unwitting participation in a neoliberal economy and governmentality as an explanation of the relationship between artists, money, and entrepreneurial action. I use the ouroboros to describe the state of that relationship and also my hope for its future, a future in which the tail, money, can perhaps be replaced by non-commodities.
Then Covid-19 hit. Most of the essays that follow were completed prior to the pandemic, but the combination of foreboding and hope that the pandemic brings with it informs them all.
I started to make a concentrated effort to write these essays during a 2017 sabbatical from Arizona State University (ASU), for which I am deeply grateful. At the time, I was a professor and director of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Programs in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. I led a suite of programming, both curricular and cocurricular. They were the final incarnation of a program launched in 2006 in the heady days before the Great Recession called the “performing arts venture experience,” or p.a.v.e. Later rebranded as the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship, the programming won the 2015 Excellence in Entrepreneurship Education Specialty Program Award from the US Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).
Since the launch of p.a.v.e. in 2006, I have taught or mentored hundreds of artists interested in building a sustainable creative practice. Many of these were student artists at ASU but also professional artists and craftspeople in workshops I have given for arts organizations and public agencies. More important than the teaching and mentoring has been the listening and observing. It is through this listening and observing that I have begun to understand the struggles, motivations, and successes of artists.
Some of that listening was done in fifteen semi-structured formal interviews that took place during that 2017 sabbatical, in early 2018, or during the 2020 pandemic. 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 as 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