Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts

The co-editors of Artivate, Gary Beckman and Linda Essig, have shared an interest in advancing arts entrepreneurship as a field of study since Beckman first interviewed Essig as part of his research toward what has become a foundational article (2007) in the field, “”Adventuring” arts entrepreneurship curricula in higher education: An examination of present efforts, obstacles, and best practices.” The current article presents a dialogue between them in which they discuss the nature of the discipline and the challenges and opportunities presented by the launch of Artivate.

This essay looks at pedagogies that can be deployed to teach the habits of mind that support arts entrepreneurship through the lenses of frameworks developed by Gardner, Duening, and Costa & Kallick for conceptualizing ways of thinking. It draws a network of connections between these frameworks for ways of thinking on which are mapped various pedagogies for teaching arts entrepreneurs as employed in educational programs and as described in recent literature. After first briefly summarizing each of these frameworks, I graphically describe the ways these various frameworks may overlap and then offer examples of pedagogies that support the development of entrepreneurial habits of mind for artists and others.

In this essay, I investigate the relationship between local political context and entrepreneurship in the arts, specifically entrepreneurship by cultural institutions, which I refer to as “cultural entrepreneurship.” I look at cultural entrepreneurship as a discourse and discuss one locus in particular, the city of Utrecht in The Netherlands. The discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in the Dutch context is influenced by diminishing government responsibility for financial support of the arts. Entrepreneurship is seen in that context as finding new sources of income. Entrepreneurial values such as curiosity and experimentation are dominant in the routine relationship between cultural organizations and their subsidizing administrations but are not incorporated in the understanding of cultural entrepreneurship. After applying these considerations to the observation of the culture-political practice in the city of Utrecht, I suggest a framework that allows us to understand the discourse on the relationship between cultural entrepreneurship and political context along two axes. One axis moves between risk acceptance and aversion, and the other between the private and public interests.

As the first peer reviewed research journal in the field of arts entrepreneurship, Artivate: A Journal of Arts Entrepreneurship takes its role as a framer of the discourse in and around arts entrepreneurship seriously. To advance that discourse, in addition to the articles and book reviews that have been regular features of Artivate, we have invited members of our editorial board and staff to contribute short think pieces. For these pieces we asked contributors to consider open-ended questions to which they could respond in whole or in part: what is their position in relation to arts entrepreneurship; how is arts entrepreneurship situated in relation to other disciplines or fields; what are the problems we are grappling with as scholars, practitioners, teachers, and artists; and what are the research questions we are attempting to answer individually or as a field? Following, you will find responses from: Andrew Taylor, Associate Professor of arts management at American University; Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of performance as public practice at UT-Austin and author of Performing Policy (reviewed in this issue); and Artivate’s publisher and co-editor, Linda Essig, Evelyn Smith Professor and director of the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State.