How art becomes organization: Reimagining aesthetics, sites and politics of entrepreneurship

Ditte Vilstrup Holm,Timon Beyes

doi:10.1177/0170840621998571

Abstract

Art and entrepreneurship both demonstrate a particular power to experiment with how the social is apprehended, organized and inhabited. How can we then understand and theorize the particular power of art understood as entrepreneurial organizing? In this paper, we develop the concept of artistic entrepreneuring. It is based on contemporary art’s wide-ranging ‘organizational turn’, where art becomes organization by experimenting with forms and processes of emancipatory organizing. Interweaving art theory, examples of art’s organizational turn and a processual understanding of public entrepreneurship, we conceptualize artistic entrepreneuring as fundamentally aesthetic, necessarily sited and invariably political, and we discuss the implications for entrepreneurship studies and research on the aesthetics and politics of organizing.

Highlights

Art and entrepreneurship both experiment with how the social is apprehended, organized and inhabited
The politics of artistic entrepreneuring is in this sense unshackled from the institutional field of politics and becomes an aesthetic one: It experiments with new forms and styles of collective expression and experience that alter the ways social organizing is perceived and can be enacted
Reviewing and putting into dialogue both approaches – the bourgeoning interest in entrepreneurship as social change, and art’s manifold organizational turn, we have placed an emphasis on contemporary art’s remarkable and wide-ranging engagement with practices of organizing as material of art, which has so far only sporadically found its way into studies of organizing and entrepreneuring

Summary

Introduction

Art and entrepreneurship both experiment with how the social is apprehended, organized and inhabited. Situating our undertaking at the interstices of art theory and an understanding of entrepreneuring as social change, we develop a notion of artistic entrepreneuring that is based on art’s own practice of, and reflections on, doing the work of organizing.

Results

Conclusion