Sounding Board – Creative entrepreneurship

Ian Chance considers what it means to be an entrepreneur in the arts, and suggests a new definition of the role.
While arts professionals can all identify with and share in the celebration of creativity, seeking a definition for a word like entrepreneurship remains a somewhat tricky question. At the heart of the expression creative entrepreneurship is the paradoxical use of a rather long French word to describe the heroes of the hallowed British capitalist system  which suggests we lack our own word to identify such important people in our society.

Origins

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs across the world have long been recognised as being key to the successful development of new business and the creation of material wealth. Entrepreneurial skills and abilities are attributed to imaginative, innovative, self-reliant, enterprising and creative people, capable of managing risk and able to stick to their vision despite challenges and set backs. Furthermore, they possess the capacity to identify and create opportunity as producers. These attributes and skills are also recognised, identified and shared by many artists.

Nonetheless, the social sector, which includes those of us who work in the arts, has remained relativity untouched by entrepreneurship, due in part to being protected or sheltered by the State as a monopoly tax gatherer and service provider. Like many aspects of society, this is all now subject to challenging stresses, resulting in fragmentation, and exposing, in this case, a revealing contrast in dynamics between the public and private sector. If we agree that entrepreneurial skills are not so much invented as found, it suggests these attributes are already present and just waiting to be discovered or recognised. We should not, however, make the assumption that entrepreneurial skills and competence are defined or limited to those from the world of business. The entrepreneurial attributes of the creative arts have been largely overlooked but their time has now come.

A wider definition

The way in which we perceive entrepreneurship in the UK needs challenging, an objective not helped by the word still being associated with wealth creation alone. Already we are seeing examples demonstrating the benefits of entrepreneurship emerging in the social context, in the form of sponsored awards in the media, and high-profile projects lead by individuals such as Tim Smit and Jamie Oliver.

The equivalent in the cultural sector would extend to individual and collective cultural and creative enterprises lead by creative entrepreneurs. If business entrepreneurs maximise profit for themselves, shareholders and the wider economy, why not celebrate social and creative entrepreneurs maximising social, cultural and artistic benefit for the wider community? The recognition of creative entrepreneurship across society would then be linked to an understanding that artists have the potential to apply virtuous entrepreneurial core values. It also frees our thinking from former business models and releases new opportunities for cultural leadership and artistic vision, with all the associated benefits.

Throughout history, creative artists have been perceived as being reluctant to commercialise, or even of being incapable of commercialising their work. I believe this does not reflect the way that many creative people actually think. There is a distinction here which this over-romanticised view of creativity overlooks: the fact that commercialisation is not the same as entrepreneurship. There is, however, some truth in the suspicion that the essentially philistine mentality is attracted to deprecating the artist, fostering the view of a romantic dependent, whilst linking the commercial to compromise.

This approach ignores those artists who have shown great innovation, courage and creativity in developing and sustaining their work with enterprise and self-reliance, taking risks and holding to their vision. In applying themselves in this way, artists can provide a challenge to the status quo. Acting with integrity and creative enterprise liberates new standards and examples of cultural leadership.

In recent times, artists for whom independence of thought is a priority have proved irritating for the policy makers. Some of us are all too familiar with official exasperation at our perceived lack of appetite for arts as social work, with our inability to be enthusiastic about one-sided partnerships, and our reluctance to welcome yet more managerial control in the cultural sector. Politicians and bureaucrats get frustrated at our lack of ambition to respond to centrally driven targets, our complete failure to subscribe to the myth of romantic dependency, and our persistence in believing the value of the arts lies in it avoiding being politicised.

New entrepreneurs

I would advocate equating creativity with entrepreneurship, and defining the artist as a creative entrepreneur able to sustain independent practice in the face of 21st century challenges in culture, politics, entertainment, media, education and the environment. I believe arts practitioners, if so recognised and acknowledged, could sustain their creative work, develop new contexts for working and contribute vital new creative leadership through a new-found autonomy of expertise.

Ian Chance is Director of the Farleys Yard Trust, East Sussex, based on the artistic legacy of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, also Director of the MA in Creative Entrepreneurship at the University of East Anglia.
e: [email protected]