Creative and performing arts schools are increasingly facing the challenge of developing curricula to address an employability agenda in higher education. Arts entrepreneurship education is thought to address this need because it supports the unique nature of the work circumstances of creative and performing arts graduates. As an emerging area of research, arts entrepreneurship education faces the challenge of not only being relevant and important to creative and performing arts education but of being robust enough to contribute to a “paradigm shift” (Beckman, 2011, p. 29). With this in mind, this article attempts to clarify a recurring theme of arts entrepreneurship education, this being the development of an “entrepreneurial mindset.”

We argue that if an entrepreneurial mindset is to be considered an essential aspect of arts entrepreneurship education, educators need to have a good understanding of what it means and how it might be taught. We examine data from four interviews with arts educators who have responsibility for teaching arts entrepreneurship in creative and performing arts schools. Their experiences enable us to clarify the meaning of an “entrepreneurial mindset” in a creative and performing arts context in higher education and to make suggestions about teaching and learning.

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.