Is there such a thing as Arts Entrepreneurship?
Jennifer Rosenblatt and I (Kurt Knecht) are off to UMKC today to do a presentation on entrepreneurship. Talking about entrepreneurship is something that I find myself doing more often these days. It’s a good ‘ship’ as they go, but I’m still confused about the ‘arts’ modifier.
I mean, I don’t think my entrepreneurship is more artsy than someone else. I don’t think that I have some innate artistic sense that works like a ray gun that I can point toward different things. Zap! Now your customer development is being conducted in iambic pentameter. Zap! Now your quarterly projections are all crawling around the page like squalid figures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Zap! Your product to market fit has all the sweet sonority of a perfect authentic cadence.
I’m also a little suspect about whether or not entrepreneurship and the arts have the same goals. When it comes to business, efficiency has to be a priority. There are certain analogies here when it comes to the economy of elements in an artistic work, but ultimately, there are successful artistic works that are extravagant and inefficient.
So are all these classes on Arts Entrepreneurship just regular entrepreneurship pointed at the arts? Is a Beethoven Symphony something that can be shoe-horned into the concept of a product/market fit? Something like “Dark Knight Rises” is clearly a product/market fit on a grand scale, but something like “Pi” by Aronofsky is also a fit on a different scale? Are “true” artists trying to find a fit that is successful but not too successful? When you cross the line and get too successful, do you succeed as an entrepreneur but “sell out” as an artist?
I’m still working on figuring this out, but I can tell you one thing I have learned. Both groups are trying to solve problems, and I think there is a surprising amount of overlap despite some of the differences.
Read more of Kurt’s thoughts at the links below.
