• Home
  • About
    • About this Blog
    • About Andrew Taylor
    • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Preparing the cultural entrepreneur

May 24, 2010 by Andrew Taylor

James Undercofler in his State of the Art blog suggests that the current training, support, and authorizing systems we use to advance the nonprofit and public arts are not prepared to engage the cultural entrepreneur. And boy, does he have a point.

The essential elements of successful entrepreneurship — chief among them seed capital and hands-on support — are almost impossible to find among charitable foundations or traditional funders. Although there are a few bright lights in the system helping to lead the way.

Artist-focused initiatives like Creative Capital, the Center for Cultural Innovation, Fractured Atlas, Springboard for the Arts, and others have long been supporting innovation and creative enterprise, including training and specialized funding. But traditional support institutions like foundations, government arts agencies, and higher education have a long way to go to catch up.

Like Undercofler’s students, I’m seeing a broader palette of interest among each incoming class to our MBA in Arts Administration. While we began our degree over 40 years ago with a specific focus on corporate professional leadership in arts and culture institutions, incoming students are almost entirely ‘tax status agnostic.’ They have powerful creative or community visions, and want to get them realized. If nonprofit or public status is the way to get there, fine. If not, they’re open to a full range of other business options — which is why many come to an MBA.

It’s increasingly clear that the professional nonprofit we’ve come to know as a standard in the past decades will continue to be an essential part of the arts and culture system. But it’s also clear that those structures are NOT appropriate to every artistic or creative endeavor. Glad to know that James and others are following this thread.

Filed Under: main

Comments

  1. Kim says

    July 21, 2010 at 5:28 pm

    You were mentioned on the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Program Blog. We’d love your input!
    http://columbiasocialenterprise.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/audience-2-0-new-audiences-for-the-arts

  2. cory huff says

    July 22, 2010 at 12:58 pm

    Hi Andrew. Just discovered your blog and I am happy to read that there are Arts Administrators publicly speaking about the issue of entrepreneurial training for artists.
    I’m currently getting ready to launch a members-only training program for selling Art online and I’ve heard from a lot of artists that there’s nothing like it around.
    It’s my firm belief that teaching individual artists to have more business skills, and develop a for-profit mindset, is the best way to raise the Art world as a whole.

About Andrew Taylor

Follow @artfulmanager
Andrew Taylor is a faculty member of American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC...
[Read More …]

Get weekly updates by e-mail

Follow me on Twitter

Tweets by @artfulmanager

Recent Comments

  • Andrew Taylor on The loosely-coupled future of live performance: “Great points, Meg! And agreed that the large-scale performing arts could and should look to adjacent industries for insights about…” Apr 30, 11:41
  • Andrew Taylor on The loosely-coupled future of live performance: “Thanks John! So helpful to know the pieces that resonated. And I’m equally intrigued about the agreements (formal, informal, explicit,…” Apr 30, 11:39
  • Andrew Taylor on The loosely-coupled future of live performance: “Ha! And yes, also that.” Apr 30, 11:37
  • John McCann on The loosely-coupled future of live performance: “Thanks for this overwhelmingly useful piece! While it’s nice to be reminded of Weick and the tightly coupled/loosely coupled realities,…” Apr 30, 11:18
  • Trevor O’Donnell on The loosely-coupled future of live performance: “Your title made me think of a concert hall where every couple was seated six feet apart!” Apr 29, 10:11

Archives

Creative Commons License
The written content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images are not covered under this license, but are linked (whenever possible) to their original author.

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in