Description

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Essays on the relationship between artists and entrepreneurship. 

As in sports, business, and other sectors, the top 1% of artists have disproportionately influenced public expectations for what it means to be successful. In Creative Infrastructures, Linda Essig takes an unconventional approach and looks at the quotidian artist—and at what they do, not what they make. All too often, artists who are attentive to the business side of their creative practice are accused of selling out. But for many working artists, that attention to business is what enables them not just to survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission, Essig contends that they don’t sell out, they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront. Through illustrative case studies from culturally and racially diverse communities, Essig examines the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money while offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means than ends. 

About the Author

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Linda Essig is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Praise For…

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“An intellectual delight for scholars, teachers, and artists who want to develop a systemic and comprehensive understanding of arts entrepreneurship as an academic field; a social, economic, and cultural phenomenon; or simply a term full of controversies and possibilities. . . . Essig’s insightful piece of work is a bold reimagination of non-capitalist ways of living, creating, and influencing for artists.”
— Wen Guo, Artivate

"I heartily welcome Essig’s thinking and her willingness to push back on our inclination to see entrepreneurial action as the answer to support production and distribution of art, and the careers of artists. Her questions and observations enrich the conversation as artists and arts organizations shape a post-pandemic future in a changed environment. These essays provide an important opportunity to apply a critical lens to our willingness to embrace entrepreneurial structures at the cost of nurturing alternatives."
— Claudia Bach, American Journal of Arts Management