Art Entrepreneurship edited by M. Scherdin and I. Zander

Abstract

The title of this collection of essays could be slightly misleading. The contributors discuss art entrepreneurship less than they confront entrepreneurship and art. However, this makes the book more interesting as it brings a new contribution to a longstanding problem: that of understanding the specificity of artistic and technical innovations, and by and large the difference between art or culture and technique. The theme is large, but the authors do not digress. The nine chapters focus on the confrontation between the management, and, to a lesser extent, the economy of technical and artistic innovation. What are the differences between them? How does commercial invention differ from artistic innovation? Why does research appear to struggle when trying to establish concrete differences between art objects and technical innovations, while the public seems not to share such views? All the contributions turn around these same questions and finally raise similar difficulties because they all rest upon the assumption that artistic objects as well as technical innovations have an ‘objective’—but still poorly crafted—existence. As an illustration, the long and detailed contribution by Per Frankelius on ‘Innovation processes: Experience drawn from the creation of Dalhalla’, starts with a careful account of the creation of an object at the intersection between art and technical innovation, a new opera stage installed outside in a disused open pit quarry. The author explains how, in the first place, its managers progressively enlarged the range of productions proposed for the stage, in order to increase and secure its income. This strategy resulted in the diversification of its productions which was perceived as a threat of dispersion and loss of identity. In a second phase the stage activities were restricted and streamlined. The empirical account clearly underlines the lack of pre-existing frontiers and definitions of innovations. The reader could have expected a discussion about the malleability of the innovative objects and the management of their capacity to interest large or restricted numbers of users. Instead Frankelius propels his characterisation of the artistic and technical innovations ‘beyond’ his empirical case and within the object essence. Here, like other contributors to this book, he is caught by a longstanding difficulty. He is not able to articulate an acceptable intrinsic and therefore ‘objective’ difference between art and technical innovations.