Analysis: artists need business and business needs artists but why is it so difficult for both to work together?
By Deirdre McQuillan, TU Dublin and Elizabeth Keating, University of Texas at Austin
Companies the world over tell us they want creative, talented and innovative people. Since artists are famous for just these qualities, companies like Facebook, Xerox, Microsoft and other organisations are increasingly employing artists to instigate new ideas to benefit operations and inspire employees. For their part, artists know the pressure to focus on economic viability. Most artists incomes are shockingly low and the cost of living continues to rise.
But in many cases, artists and businesses end up unsatisfied in their efforts to work together, and opportunities are not realised. Although much has been written about business perspectives on career management, pricing, value, synergies, and customer needs, little is known about artists' perspectives.
We set out to find out how artists nurture creativity while also focusing on generating income. Our study of the working lives of ordinary artists from large regional towns provides insights into how their non-economic definition of success differs from that understood by most managers. We started by interviewing 40 artists from Drogheda and surrounds, and expanded this through focus groups to Dungarvan, Tralee, Ballina, Mullingar, and Swords
Successful engagement of talented creatives involves a sensitive approach to how artists view career management, pricing and value, synergies, and customer needs. Here are four lessons we learned from our study
An artist's career is a marathon not a sprint
A professional artist’s career trajectory cannot be seen as a linear progression from starting work at 18 to retiring at 65. Many, particularly women, manage their careers by moving in and out of art production work over a lifetime. Often artists have to leave their art practice for months or years, possibly to rear children or to make money, yet they still consider themselves artists.
This mobility is related to the concept of art time, or how the creative process is not amenable to normal work schedules. For example, though artists say they have to "show up" ready to create daily, there are no guarantees that time is productive, making it difficult to measure career success in the short term.
Artists value the process of creating apart from price and value
How much do you pay for talent? Artists are reluctant to engage in discussions of price and value, fearing they will betray their professional ideals or ethics. To protect the independence of their creativity, many artists distance themselves from instances of cultural legitimacy and recognition, such as subsidies or prizes. Recently, arts councils, arts centres and their agencies have prioritised fair remuneration policies. But the economics of the art world are highly complex, involving symbolic, sociohistorical, and market values, and in some cases primary and secondary market values.
The individuality of the creative mind
The process of supporting and protecting creative talent is unique to each artist. What might be perceived as non-art work for one artist might be an extension of art for another. For some, creativity has many branches, but for others just a few.
Almost all artists need to have supplementary jobs, since income from art is too low to sustain even a single person, but supplementary jobs threaten their art time and available energy. Some artists found supplementary jobs more harmonious with nurturing their sources of creativity than others.
Interestingly, the same job considered creatively inspiring for one artist could be considered hostile to art productivity by another. For example, some artists described how running workshops was a creative process that mutually fed into their art work. Others were irritated by the distraction of such work as another infringement on time for their art practice.
Given that art time is the artist’s most precious resource for nurturing talent, creativity, and innovation, understanding how to find an individual artist’s synergistic ways of linking art and other tasks relevant to financial gain could lead to better business collaborations; taking time to understand each artist’s needs in protecting art time is crucial.
The role of customer and peer engagement in creative lives
Few artists are creating art with a customer in mind. Paradoxically, customers want to connect with artists, including hearing the story behind their work and the process. This is sometimes resolved when artists practice in a public space (which also helps market their work), or share their process of creation on social media.
Rather than being motivated by their customers, artists are energised by talking to other artists, partly because making art can lead to feelings of isolation and artists experience little support. Forums for connecting artists could facilitate collaboration between business and artists, as could providing time for an organization’s artists to independently leverage peer connections, which are conducive to inspiration, wellbeing and learning.
Most people know very little about the working lives of the artists in their community, even though by their numbers they are a significant part of the art world. Yet understanding artists’ unconventional perspectives is essential to beneficial exchange between art and business worlds, and to preventing exploitation of artists, or contributing to the financial precarity of artists.
The research was funded by the Irish Research Council and undertaken in partnership with the Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda.
Dr Deirdre McQuillan is a senior researcher at TU Dublin and project team lead on the European University of Technology initiative. Prof Elizabeth Keating is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a Fulbright Scholar in the College of Business at TU Dublin in 2022.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
