Arts Entrepreneurship: An Essential Sub-System of the Artist’s Meta-Praxis

Abstract

As the field of Arts Entrepreneurship education continues to grow, the barriers it confronts prevent maximum vitality. Leading scholars and administrators indicate that program development and formal accreditation standards are important components supporting the field's growth. As such, this document explores next steps and examines how to move the field towards academic maturity. First, notable Arts Entrepreneurship academic programs are compared and contrasted as a representative sample of existing curricular approaches. Second, issues of accreditation are analyzed as barriers preventing growth, followed by recommendations for removing these obstacles. Third, the Artist's Meta-Praxis conceptual framework is presented as a way to describe an artist's motivations and goals. By articulating how entrepreneurial action fits into the "life practice" of artists, this document suggests a synergetic relationship between the two, thus enabling artists to better fulfill their professional goals. Consequently, the framework focuses on: 1) the complexity of entrepreneurship in music (and by extension, all arts disciplines), and 2) finding specific, sufficient pathways capable of logically placing entrepreneurial action within the broader context of a musician's (and by extension, all artists) professional activities. The Artist's Meta-Praxis is intended to depict commonalities and amplify profound connections between artistic action and the art of entrepreneurial action. Accordingly, the framework is presented as a step towards empowering arts students for the complexities of effective entrepreneurial action, by identifying and ordering the scope of knowledge and skills artists need for entrepreneurial success. Further, the model demonstrates how entrepreneurship education and training could be integrated into higher education arts programs, serving to help faculty, administrators and students recognize the relationships between content, concept, and context when engaging in artistic and entrepreneurial action. By including the necessary and sufficient elements that an artist -- acting entrepreneurially -- would require, the framework contains explanatory power, both in minute detail and broad categories, regarding the totality of how an arts entrepreneur's system functions. A fourth theme in the document uses classical guitar training as an example, demonstrating that artistic training in general, and guitar in particular, requires the engagement of divergent thinking, which produces artists with the specific skills needed for significant entrepreneurial action.

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