Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money and Entrepreneurial Action

By Linda Essig

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.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789385731

Linda Essig

Linda Essig is Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She has previously served as dean of the College of Arts & Letters at California State University, Los Angeles. director of enterprise and entrepreneurship programmes for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, and director of its School of Theatre and Film. In 2012, she launched  Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, the first-ever research journal in the field. Her articles have been published in Cultural Trends, Entrepreneurship Research Journal, Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, Theatre Topics, Stage Directions, Theatre Design and Technology and elsewhere.  Formerly a professional lighting designer, she has designed for theatres throughout the country. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on both arts entrepreneurship and lighting design, and three previous books: Lighting and the Design Idea (now in its third edition), The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change and The Arizona Arts Entrepreneur Toolkit. 

Book preview

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.

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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 by asking really smart questions. Joanna Guevara and Mollie Flanagan deserve special thanks for their coauthorship of several reports and studies. Some of these were developed with support from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, whose arts program manager, Heather Pontonio, has been an influence on me and the field.

Upon leaving ASU in 2018, I became dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Cal State LA. I thank Lynn Mahoney, José Luis Alvarado, Jose Gomez, and President Bill Covino for their support of this project. Special thanks go to my assistant, Flora Saavedra-Hernandez, who helped me to carve a few hours a week (some weeks) out of an otherwise packed calendar.

Finally, thank you to my children, Simon and Monica, who grew into adulthood while I was learning, and to my loving partner Glenn, who has admirably sustained his own creative practice as a lighting designer for over thirty years.

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.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the ouroboros—artists connect art with audience to generate the revenue needed to make more art—the ouroboros is an organism living inside a much larger ecosystem, one that is not particularly friendly to artists, even self-sustaining ones. It is an ecosystem filled with jargon, competition, power struggles, and extremes of both poverty and wealth. The very term entrepreneurship conjures images of high-rolling venture capitalists, Shark Tank–style pitch competitions, and slickly produced slide decks. Therefore, it is with some ambivalence that I continue to use the term arts entrepreneurship to mean something slightly different: actions and mindsets unique to artists that are as much about self-sustainability as wealth creation and that can result in increasing collective well-being rather than merely economic growth. This book endeavors to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question, How can artists make work and thrive in this late-capitalist society?

The Approach

Although informed by economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, philosophers such as John Dewey, and sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, ultimately my analytical approach is not theirs, but is instead dramaturgical. Having spent 25 years as a theatre artist, it is not surprising that my analytical lens is dramaturgical: What are the given conditions? Who are the characters? What is their backstory and motivation? What is the arc of transformation or change? Perhaps most important, who is in control of the narrative? In surveying the arts and culture sector, as in many other policy areas, the narrative appears to be controlled by those with the most money: the funders and buyers. In my utopian view for the future of the arts and culture sector, the narrative is controlled by the artists themselves, behaving entrepreneurially to connect means with desirable ends. I contend that this utopian view is no less impossible than is a frictionless free market completely disassociated from the needs of society, as Karl Polanyi so eloquently argues in his classic of economic history, The Great Transformation.¹ He contends that the impossibility of a self-regulating market for art or anything else results from a market that ignores social interaction and the actual behavior of humans. What art does is put humans and the human experience first, with commodity and asset exchange at the tail end.

The dramaturge works at a kind of middle distance with which I am comfortable: close enough to be part of the process, but distant enough to see the big picture. My background as a theatre maker provides a grounding in this kind of analysis, especially in my role as a lighting designer, tasked with the simultaneous expression of minute detail and overarching themes. But it is my training in policy analysis that introduced me to stakeholder theory—a theory that addresses a key dramaturgical question, Who are the players and what is their motivation? What motivates the artist to create, the buyer to buy, the funder to support, or the audience member to attend?

What of the setting, the given conditions? Despite the Romantic notion of the artist suffering away in isolation in a garret, artists who are innovators, whose work has impact, create in a socio-economic policy environment. My colleague Paul Bonin-Rodriguez describes it as the space in which decisions by both public and private entities that either directly or indirectly shape the environment in which arts and culture are created, disseminated, and consumed.² Bonin-Rodriguez views this policy environment through the lens of performance studies and so, like me, focuses on the actors and their actions.

Artist William Powhida expresses that environment and its interconnected cast of characters graphically, in what may be the most detailed and accurate (albeit subjective) map of the sector—it takes an artist to do so (see Figure 1, p.7).

A system map of the visual arts economy that places artists at the center and connects them to various nodes including institutions, prediction markets, merit, and alternative economies.

Figure 1: Powhida’s map of the field. Source: William Powhida, State 1—Solidarity Economies , 2014.

Although Powhida concentrates on the environment for visual artists, his context for paying artists applies across the subsectors of the arts and culture economy. Artists of all kinds find themselves working with institutions that may provide opportunities of one kind or another: for exposure, for prestige, or even for sales. There is a history of expressing the relationship between artists toiling alone to make art-for-art’s-sake and artists who produce work for profit commercially as being in fundamental opposition,³ but such dichotomous relationships are too simplistic, as Powhida’s system map makes clear. While Bourdieu suggests that artistic innovation happens when the audience for the art is other producers, a kind of artistic elite,⁴ Camus argues that for art to be an integral part of society, it cannot be merely for itself:

Art for art’s sake, the entertainment of a solitary artist, is indeed the artificial art of a factitious and self-absorbed society. The logical result of such a theory is the art of little cliques or the purely formal art fed on affectations and abstractions and ending in the destruction of all reality. In this way a few works charm a few individuals while many coarse inventions corrupt many others. Finally art takes shape outside of society and cuts itself off from its living roots.⁵

In unpacking the relationship between art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money, I wrestle with this seemingly never-ending tension between the artist and audience and between the commercial and noncommercial production of art, in a way that will hopefully be of use to artists, audience members, and the institutions that connect them.

Defining Terms: Art, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Money

The ouroboros has four sections: art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money. While the question What is art? is too broad to consider here, I do consider the characteristics of the arts and culture sector and its products in order to define the edges of what might be considered to be art. In an earlier essay, I contend that art products are distinguished by three features.⁶ First is the uniqueness of the creation. While art may be reproduced, it is not mass produced. (This topic is explored in depth in Essay Four.) Second, referencing Williams, I distinguish between the corporate ownership of the means of cultural production and what might instead be called artisanal or artistic production.⁷ The control of the means of production by the artist and/or artistic producer is a channel for arts entrepreneurs to convert available means into desirable ends, including their own sustainable creative practice. I do not mean that only artist-run or artisan micro-enterprises can be considered to be art. Major recording artists, for example, from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, have successfully maintained control over the production of their artistic work. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, art has symbolic meaning and cultural value. Art products have a use value first in the communication of ideas and only secondarily in their functional capacity. Isabelle Graw insists that art is a commodity, albeit a unique one that has both symbolic value and market value,⁸ but I argue that art exists outside of the market and that art that does not have market value is still art. Lewis Hyde similarly acknowledges that works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy and only one of these is essential.⁹ The economies, however, are more than two and complexly interconnected, as Powhida illustrates. The question becomes, as will be discussed later, must art become a commodity in order to generate the money that feeds the head of the ouroboros?

Creativity, the generation of novel ideas, is at the heart of the artistic process, but innovation is the catapult that launches that creativity into the world. Innovation is, as John Dewey writes, a departure from the customary.¹⁰ True creativity, according to Csikszentmihalyi, must be recognized as innovative—both new and impactful.¹¹ Whereas innovative design connects a specific solution to a specific problem, innovative art communicates a discovery that connects to human experience in a new way. Art may be deployed to solve a problem, but the core of the solution is in the interaction between the art and its human receptor, its audience. To be innovative, and by extension entrepreneurial, the artist makes work not only for themselves but also for other people.

Entrepreneurship is the action that connects that innovative artistic product to its audience within the socio-economic policy environment. I define arts entrepreneurship as the identification or creation of opportunity to connect one’s means with their desirable ends through an appropriate mediating structure in order to create value that may be aesthetic, cultural, and/or financial. I came to this definition empirically, through both extensive reviews of existing literature and observation of the entrepreneurial actions of artists, especially in the context of arts venture incubation programs.¹² The kernel of activity at the core, again, is the action of connecting art with audience.

The tail end of the serpent is the money and other assets that result from putting an innovative artistic product into the world through entrepreneurial action. Financial wealth (i.e. money) is one possible outcome of the exchange that takes place between an entrepreneurial artist and their audience, but it is only one. There is also the extension of money to the security and physiological needs it helps to meet through purchasing power. It is worth noting that money is not the only kind of capital transformed by or generated from the production of art. Other types of capital in the art value chain may include, most obviously, cultural and aesthetic capital. Social capital also often plays an important part in cultural production, sometimes taking the place of financial capital in the early-stage development of art enterprises (including individual artist practice). It is a mistake, however, to think about these relationships solely in terms of capital accrual. In the cyclical structure of the ouroboros, the money that is generated is used by the art/artist for the production of more innovative art that, in turn, contributes to both the individual well-being of the artist and the collective well-being of society.

Given Conditions: The Late-Capitalist Economy

To understand where we are, it is helpful to look at history. The economic historian I turn to more than any other is Karl Polanyi. By tracking the economic history of Europe from the Enclosure Act¹³ to the start of WW II, he shows that the self-regulating market is a myth, a fiction, a utopian fantasy. Social forces instead produce a double movement in which market forces move one way and regulation another in order to correct the social wrongs writ by a free market.¹⁴ We find ourselves now in a period of social dislocation not dissimilar to that which followed the Enclosure Act or the Industrial Revolution, a time when markets (or the market) have failed the social system, leaving a concentration of wealth at the very apex of society, a broad swath of poverty at the bottom, and some folks in the middle, a few of whom are artists. The social dislocation we experience in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is further complicated by the overdue acknowledgment, in the US at least, that the failures of the social system result in whole or in part not only from class difference but from race and caste hierarchies¹⁵ as well.

Samuelson and Ostrom define public, private, club, and commons goods in economic terms,¹⁶ but Polanyi looks at the social construction of ownership of goods. He provides examples from both European and non-European cultures to explain that there are a range of ownership concepts and that the property rights we commonly understand today are the result of Enlightenment-era philosophies and policies. In one example of a society that constructs ownership collectively, he writes, "[...] the woman coming back from her search for roots, fruit or leaves are expected to offer the greater part