Organizing the unpredictable: entrepreneurship and the performing arts

David antunes,
2018
1 This can be documented from the increasing literature on the subject, mainly from the arts field.
2 It seems to me that, in the field of arts and, specifically in the domain of performing arts, there is a lack of quantitative or systematic evidence about this issue, especially in Europe. Nevertheless, the assumption that maybe schools should upgrade their missions, objectives, procedures and narratives, comes from the observation of the variable contexts of art and contemporary art objects. In the field of performing arts, this is particularly apparent, since it is clear that both artists and the professional world changed the way they organize themselves. For instance, the relative stability that one could find in a theatre company disappeared or almost disappeared, being substituted by an individual career management, multiple professional relations, intermittent projects, and internationalization. If we consider “entrepreneurship as an organizing activity” “an organizing emergence” or “the creation of new combinations” (Gartner, 2015: 4), then it is necessary to understand this changing of paradigm in the performing arts from that perspective, in order to adjust and adapt education institutions.
There is quantitative data and report analysis, referring the USA and Canada. For this, see the work of Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) [http://snaap.indiana.edu/] and, specifically, the special report Painting With Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of An Arts Degree, available at http://snaap.indiana.edu/pdf/
snaap_special%20report_1.pdf
. See also (White, 2013).
3 The long‐term value of an artist, as measured by reputation or sales figures for artworks, and of an entrepreneur starting out with a new venture, does not necessarily reveal itself overnight. Many attempts at measuring the contribution of art to social and economic welfare have been undertaken (…), but the measurable value remains hard to determine. (Lindqvist, 2011: 11)
4 Entrepreneurs are not necessarily motivated by greed and profit (…); indeed, they are more often inspired by the idea of progress, technological or otherwise, or merely fuelled by a desire to fulfill their dreams (…). In this respect they are similar to artists, many of whom reject any association with the more commercial aspects of their field of activity. (Bonnafous‐Boucher; Cuir & Partouche, 2011: 32)
5 Consider, for instance, the significance implied in the title’s essay, already quoted, “Not a dirty word: Arts entrepreneurship and higher education”, by Ruth Bridgstock.
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). 
I pass now to my third and final aspect, that is, the implications of common conceptions of art and the receptiveness of ideas that challenge those conceptions. One of the ideas challenging art today is related to entrepreneurship. In part this also happens because it seems that artists are being pushed to become several things apart from or aside of being “simply” artists, either out of personal necessity or in consequence of an array of visions about art that make of art a substitute for politics, social and civic awareness, spiritual and ethical experience, personal growing and fulfillment, and so on. Of course, I am not reducing the importance of those dimensions in the practicing of arts, and especially in the performing arts, mainly because there is no specific object of the arts but the artist himself or herself, the world at large and other people.

Nevertheless, whenever one has to consider such a topic as entrepreneurship among artists, one has a sense of discomfort coming out, I think, of a common and wide spread notion of art that is related to the idea of art for art’s sake, having its roots in romanticism (l’art pour l’art, by the nineteenth century French philosopher Victor Cousin). At the same time, though, artists tend to have, fortunately, strong reasons for doing what they found, sometimes, even mysteriously, compelled to do, that is, art. And these reasons imply usually the consideration of others things or the calling upon what I would describe as external factors that are paradoxical with a strong version of the motto art for art’s sake. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the case of performing art students, initiating their studies and not only because of a lack of theoretical argumentation or aesthetic naiveté, but simply because they believe that their future jobs are somehow related with the production of meaning to life. As Bridgstock says:

when artists are asked about their motivations for making art, they give a variety of answers, some of which do indeed imply instrumental reasons for practice at least some of the time. The artistic protean career, with its emphasis on personal motivations for career and psychological success, does seem to involve intrinsic motivations such as artistic fulfillment and growth, creation of beauty, engaging in challenge and creating something entirely new. However, just as often (and often at the same time), artists report extrinsic motivations such as connection and communication with others; building community; recognition from colleagues and career furtherment [sic]; contribution to the growth and development of their artforms; and making a living (…). Of course there are also some artists who are strongly motivated by profit. For instance, Warhol (1975) famously stated ‘making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art’. (128-129)

And maybe this is also why it seems that both artists and entrepreneurs are very keen of the objective of creating social welfare, in the process of becoming socially acknowledged.

Be as it may, it seems now important to draw some conclusions from what has been said that are related to arts curricula design. The first thing is that it seems quite persuasive to advocate a relation between arts and entrepreneurship, not because they are incongruent with each other but, the other way around, that is, because they apparently share innumerous aspects, being the salient one the fact that they constitute themselves in the process of acting in a particular form. As Rikke L. Heinsen (2018) suggests, the entrepreneurial approach to arts, specifically, to performing arts, implies “the creation of new learning spaces in order to ‘stretch’ reflection competences through reflection methods” (2018: 1). These are not necessarily theoretical, but characterized by disturbance, changing of positions and decision-making processes that “expand creation possibilities”. Necessarily, this implies rethinking the role of teacher as one that is capable and has the courage to inhabit and to mediate unstable places in order to organize the unpredictable:

by seeing artistic entrepreneurship as an important and integrated part of a modern performance school and by exploring the position of creation while we look upon entrepreneurship as a creation of new realities, maybe we can cultivate an environment for mediators and curators who are willing to ‘stretch’ themselves, to be unstable, uncertain and keen to expand the field TOGETHER with the students. Mediators or curators who are solidly placed in their different disciplines but who are always curious to enter the field ofinterdisciplinarity. Learners who are more interested in the interdependent acts and the generative acts than the act of the individual and the talent. (…)We need to make new narratives and disrupt routines! (Heinsen, 2018: 6, pdf. not published)

It seems to me that Heinsen’s view and style are easily related to a few basic ideas that can lead to curricula improvements in performing arts higher education.Following Heinsen, Bridgstock (2014) and Preece (2011), I conclude stressing severalaspects. Entrepreneurship can suggest important changing, especially in the pedagogicand methodological dimensions of creation and project oriented work. It is imperative to orient students for the building of an “adaptative career identity”. This adaptative career identity tries to answer, since the beginning, to basic questions such as “Why am I doing this?”; “Do I want to do it?”, “Who am I, while doing this?”, “Who I want to be?”, etc., and emphasizes the studying and understanding of processes and contexts of art, professional contexts of art and organizations of art. Such procedures, as the building of art portfolios, seem determinant, not only after the conclusion of a specific degree, but during all its completion. The acquisition of multidisciplinary skills, including entrepreneurial ones, should not be seen and presented as a response to a specific need, that come as a fixed set of contents, but as a toolbox for expanding the practice and, at the same time, to disrupt and reframe its position, unveiling unexpected opportunities. Project based curricula seems a place for training a diverse set of skills and competences, potentially encompassing all the creation cycle in its different dimensions and implications, private, collective, and public. Finally, as Heinsen seems to imply when she says “We need to make new narratives and disrupt routines!”, there is an element of passion and courage involved in all this that, maybe, will change our expected biographies and come as a surprise.

References

Berry, D. (2011). Art and entrepreneurship, apart and together. In Mikael Scherdin and Ivo Zander 2011. Art Entrepreneurship. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. 154‐168.

Bonnafous‐Boucher, M; Cuir, R. & Partouche, M. (2011). The new and the challenge of the market or the non‐ instrumental function of creation. In Mikael Scherdin and Ivo Zander 2011. 23‐49.

Bridgstock, R. (2014). Not a dirty word: Arts entrepreneurship and higher education. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3) 122–137.

Dempster, D. (2011). “Some Immodest Proposals (and Hunches) for Conservatory Education.” In Beckman, Gary D. Disciplining The Arts: Teaching Entrepreneurship in Context. Ed. Gary D. Beckman. Kindle. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Education, 134.

Gartner, William B. (2015). Perspectives on arts entrepreneurship, Part 2. Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. 4 (2) 3‐9 http://artivate.org

Heinsen, Rikke L. (2018). To create and curate new learning spaces as a part of artistic entrepreneurship ‐ a research project with disturbance as a principle. (updated version of a conference in Copenhagen, 2014).

Lindqvist, K. (2011). Artist entrepreneurs. In Mikael Scherdin and Ivo Zander 2011. 10‐22.

Preece, Stephen B. (2011). Performing Arts Entrepreneurship: Toward a Research Agenda. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 41:2, 103-°©‐120,
DOI: 10.1080/10632921.2011.573445.

White, Jason C. (2013). Barriers to recognizing arts entrepreneurship education as essential to professional arts training. Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. 2 (3) 28‐39 http://artivate.org
1 This can be documented from the increasing literature on the subject, mainly from the arts field.
2 It seems to me that, in the field of arts and, specifically in the domain of performing arts, there is a lack of quantitative or systematic evidence about this issue, especially in Europe. Nevertheless, the assumption that maybe schools should upgrade their missions, objectives, procedures and narratives, comes from the observation of the variable contexts of art and contemporary art objects. In the field of performing arts, this is particularly apparent, since it is clear that both artists and the professional world changed the way they organize themselves. For instance, the relative stability that one could find in a theatre company disappeared or almost disappeared, being substituted by an individual career management, multiple professional relations, intermittent projects, and internationalization. If we consider “entrepreneurship as an organizing activity” “an organizing emergence” or “the creation of new combinations” (Gartner, 2015: 4), then it is necessary to understand this changing of paradigm in the performing arts from that perspective, in order to adjust and adapt education institutions.
There is quantitative data and report analysis, referring the USA and Canada. For this, see the work of Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) [http://snaap.indiana.edu/] and, specifically, the special report Painting With Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of An Arts Degree, available at http://snaap.indiana.edu/pdf/
snaap_special%20report_1.pdf
. See also (White, 2013).
3 The long‐term value of an artist, as measured by reputation or sales figures for artworks, and of an entrepreneur starting out with a new venture, does not necessarily reveal itself overnight. Many attempts at measuring the contribution of art to social and economic welfare have been undertaken (…), but the measurable value remains hard to determine. (Lindqvist, 2011: 11)
4 Entrepreneurs are not necessarily motivated by greed and profit (…); indeed, they are more often inspired by the idea of progress, technological or otherwise, or merely fuelled by a desire to fulfill their dreams (…). In this respect they are similar to artists, many of whom reject any association with the more commercial aspects of their field of activity. (Bonnafous‐Boucher; Cuir & Partouche, 2011: 32)
5 Consider, for instance, the significance implied in the title’s essay, already quoted, “Not a dirty word: Arts entrepreneurship and higher education”, by Ruth Bridgstock.