In recent years, a constant significance has been given to the relation between the arts and arts education, including the performing arts, and entrepreneurship1.Not surprisingly, though, the reception to the possibilities and implications involved in this relation is dissimilar. From the arts perspective, which is the one that concerns me, entrepreneurship can be seen either as essentially paradoxical to arts, in the sense that entrepreneurs are, supposedly, driven by defined purposes, roughly described as economical or profit oriented – “Many arts educators, arts students and practicing artists find this prevailing commercial emphasis incongruent with their career values and therefore objectionable” (Bridgstock, 2014: 128) - or as symmetrical to arts, in the sense that entrepreneurs give importance to such factors as creativity, rule and convention breaking, autonomy, independence, and so on. Both reactions, obviously, can reduce entrepreneurship to something not necessary in the arts. In one sense, it is philosophically incongruent with the concept of art, in other sense, it is already present in the arts as, putting it simply, creative methodology and career proceedings.

Putting aside the huge impact of the information technology narrative as one of chance, risk taking action, opportunity recognition, determination and success, exemplified by such characters like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, the relation between the two (arts and entrepreneurship) and the argument that artists should have entrepreneurial concerns, competences and skills, or that art entrepreneurship is a field of knowledge and practice, require, to my view, some description of three main aspects: the discontinuity between arts education and employment or the professional demands; the potential similarities between being an artist and being an entrepreneur; the persuasiveness of common conceptions of art in arts education. In this essay, I will develop briefly these three aspects, hoping that in the end it is possible to suggest some positive aspects that can emerge from an entrepreneurial approach to art education and curricula design.

The first aspect addresses, I suppose, one of the main concerns of education, that is, of its relation with the professional world. In spite of strong arguments against the idea of a direct and strict continuity between education and the practice of a particular profession, students have the expectation of and the right to expect becoming professionals of something after their undergraduate and graduate degrees and rates of employment are important indicators for the government and accreditation processes of programs. The basic question, thus, is to know if schools are fulfilling their mission of preparing future professionals notonly in terms of their competences and skills, but also in terms of the ability to understand and react to contexts of action and expectations, especially in the fluid and global world we live. As Dempster puts it, rather harshly perhaps:

What makes little sense is expecting that we can drive students through four or five or six years of a highly regimented curriculum that affords few choices and asks for little individual initiative, and then expect them to flourish in a world that rewards creativity, opportunism, experimentation, and distinctiveness more than anything else— in short, an entrepreneurial world. (2011: 250)

Evidence of this, be it may in the form of quantitative and qualitative queries, is of course a strong argument for curricula change or reframing but there are some problems2. One that is immediately obvious, assuming that art schools and universities are not answering the right demands of the professional context of art practicing, career building and career sustainability, is the supposition that the remedy for this is one that involves entrepreneurial competences or an entrepreneurial mindset. In fact, that is far from being obvious if one considers that, more often than one might think, entrepreneurship is not synonymous of immediate career success or even short or long term profit, since, by definition, it is involved with risk taking3 and management of uncertainty. Actually, even not taking into account the element of risk, recent literature in entrepreneurship stresses non-economical concerns or venture creating objectives, emphasizing the shift from economical entrepreneurship to social entrepreneurship or putting the accent on the process of creating ideas as one that ideally is without constraints (including risk assessment or market constraints) – “just as artistic practice is often claimed to be disconnected from making money, many entrepreneurs state that their primary drive in novelty creation and innovation is not about making money, but about realizing ideas and being free from restraints” (Lindqvist, 2011: 16)4.

So, it might well be that, as Daved Barry says: “entrepreneurship has more to gain from getting a ride with art than the other way around” (2011: 156) and, consequently, that arts and arts education should pay attention to other fields to supplement their students, practitioners and public needs, for instance, politics, social philosophy or auto-ethnography.

I am not making this disclaimer in order to introduce a skeptical view towards the importance of entrepreneurship in arts. In a sense, I strongly endorse the idea that “contemporary artists may resent being characterized as entrepreneurs, even though the conditions of being an artist today clearly call for an enterprising approach” (Lindqvist, 2011: 10). I am only raising this problem, in order to alter our approach perspective to the equation between arts and entrepreneurship. I am suggesting that, if there are similarities between the two and if art is already entrepreneurial, maybe what we have to discuss and answer are questions such as these: In what way being an artist is already being entrepreneurial?; Is it possible to channel some of the entrepreneurial aspects or attitudes of being an artist towards other objectives, namely the building up of an autonomous and more stable place in the professional world? Is it possible to be socially engaged and still creating ‘without constraints’? Is it possible to connect a ‘meaning‐based’ perspective of the world and a ‘need‐based’ perspective?

By now, it should be clear that the description of the first aspect that I mentioned in this essay proposition – the discontinuity between arts education and the professional world demands and configuration – overlapped, somehow, the treatment of the second aspect – the similarities between being an artist and being an entrepreneur. This should not come as a surprise, since most of the arguments for an entrepreneurial approach to art depend in the changing of misled conceptions of the word ‘entrepreneurship’ by the art world5 and for the providing of artistic examples that entrepreneurial studies refer as typical of an entrepreneurial mindset. These examples, such as Marcel’s Duchamp work, ORLAN compelling vision of herself as work of art, or Andy Warhol’s assumptions about money as art, exhibit opportunity recognition or revelation, disruptive creation, rule and convention breaking, altering of established networks of conception, production, distribution and reception, disregard and changing of the aesthetic paradigm, exploring of distant and disconnected trigger inputs or conditions, and so on. Trying to reach a conclusion on this issue, maybe the most emphatic position I found about similarities between both artists and entrepreneurs is this:

The act of becoming involved in entrepreneurship comes under the general category of action which is linked to an absolute beginning and the conditions of freedom. For both entrepreneurs and artists, there is no pre-established order which authorizes a particular type of action or the creation of a company or work of art. The entrepreneur has the capacity to trigger a series of phenomena ex nihilo or, in other words, to be at the origin of a complete series of events. This is also true of the artist. (Bonnafous-Boucher; Cuir & Partouche, 2011: 31)

It seems to me that this commonality corresponds to a transcendent or maybe kantian point of departure and I am not sure of agreeing with the authors, at least from a philosophical point of view and from the perspective of the performing arts. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge the importance of the simple idea of building up something, of unconditioned action, of no pre-established order, and ask if actually this happens or not or if schools privilege this perspective and if it should be privileged. Actually, instead of asking this, one has to ask what kind of disturbance such vision implies in a maybe rather conceptualized, craft oriented and technical centered education that characterizes some institutions of arts education. The bottom line, here, is to consider that from an entrepreneurial point of view and, apparently, from an artistic one, as well, established conditions or rules, that, on the other side, seem very important for educational environments, are inherently paradoxical. The educational and curricular challenge we have to face is, then, to know if we are able to construct alternative ways of becoming an artist and practicing: “Entrepreneurship in the art world could then be defined as suggesting alternative forms of practice in contrast to and over and above dominant practices” (Lidqvist, 2011: 13).