Marketing the Entrepreneurial Artist in the Innovation Age: Aesthetic Labor, Artistic Subjectivity, and the Creative Industries

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes marketing seminars for visual artists and arts organizations thatIattended as part of my ethnographic field research about artistic subjectivity and aesthetic labor in theCaliforniaBayArea. The marketing seminars, along with the concomitant rise of statistical data on the creative industries, reflect and generate contemporary trends that focus on crafting the visual artist as innovative entrepreneur. These entrepreneurial artists are expected to fundraise and promote their projects and to demonstrate high levels of professionalism and market savvy. While artists in theWest since the 18th century have been engaged in these types of activities, finding ways to earn a living and support their artmaking practices through forms of self‐promotion and distribution, today the emphasis has shifted to more explicitly capitalistic modes. This crafting of the ideal entrepreneurial artist mirrors broader patterns of neoliberal orientations – for example, privatization, free trade, and decreased social services. Specifically, these patterns can be detected as visual artists have become responsible for micro‐fundraising through their personal networks, promoting their own “brand,” selling their artwork directly to the public, and as artists have been encouraged by funders to collaborate with social service agencies as forms of socially engaged practices. These expectations of entrepreneurialism serve to generate additional labor for artists.

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