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.
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