The New Arts Entrepreneur: Navigating the Arts Ecologies

Within academia, business programs provide the history, tools and methods to manage and grow businesses. Entrepreneurship programs explore innovation and the creation of new business ventures. Arts Entrepreneurship is an emerging discipline centered on the unique needs related to launching and running creative practices in the fields of visual arts, performing arts, and design. Arts Entrepreneurship educators are preparing students for creative careers in the arts and cultural industries, be it as an art or design practitioner, or in a field working with or supporting artists and designers. Arts Entrepreneurship as a discipline is still being defined as researchers and educators seek to understand how to best prepare students for professional lives in the creative sector. The new Routledge publication The New Arts Entrepreneur, Navigating the Arts Ecologies (2022) by Gary D. Beckman presents a novel approach to combining elements of business, entrepreneurship and arts pedagogy while centering on the unique needs of artists and designers. In the introduction the author states that “Most established disciplines possess a codified curriculum of some sort” yet, “Serious discussions in our field [arts entrepreneurship] concerning a codified curriculum have not occurred” (p. 2). Arts Entrepreneurship educators are constantly searching for theoretical and experiential approaches that meet the needs of their programs. Since there are not established parameters for an Arts Entrepreneurship curriculum, faculty are often left to extract theoretical and experiential elements from business and entrepreneurship programs and adadpt them to their Arts Entrepreneurship courses with inconsistent results. Despite the rise in arts administration degrees and other attempts to bridge the business and art communities, Järvinen found a continuing reluctance among arts organizations to identify with business terminology or tap into business strategies. He acknowledges that the arts are not a traditional market, for example, the cost of creative labor generally increases while potential audiences for live performance are often fixed by a venue’s capacity, and there is an expectation that artists will lead, rather than follow, public demand. However, this is not an excuse to ignore strategic management. As Järvinen points out, an organization’s failure to identify their business model does not indicate that the organization does not have a business model, but rather that they have failed to articulate or capitalize on it (51), which can leave them vulnerable.