If you make up your mind to study a creative subject at a university, you will most probably get your share of family members arguing that this kind of a degree will not secure you a job that comes with a decent wage. Despite the work of Sir Ken Robinson and many others, there is a long-held assumption that creativity is not as valuable as STEM subjects these days. In the meantime, the statistics show that creative industries contribute significantly to the economy, which makes one believe that the landscape of what an artist is and does to live a creative life changes.
Although many of us think that “true” artists have to pretend that orbits of art and business never touch, in fact, whether you are a commercial banker or a conceptual artist, we all have to deal with the market. History shows, that despite the popular misconception, artists in all times had to be entrepreneurial, being fundamentally responsible for earning a living. Today, as the career path of artist is changing, public funding for the arts has declined and funding for individual artists is especially difficult to find, artists are self-employed, building their own brands and businesses, and defining themselves what their creative career should look like. The digital age has created unprecedented access and opportunities for artists to reach their audience directly, challenging traditional training and education practices and career expectations. According to 2016 NEA Study, Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, the population of artists is growing and diversifying, which also means change in the norms about who is considered an artist. Other findings reveal that substantial numbers of artists now work in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways and find work as artists in non-arts contexts.
At the same time, the study confirmed that artist-training programs are not adequately teaching creative students the non-arts skills they need to support their work (business practices, entrepreneurship, and marketing) nor how to effectively apply their creative skills in a range of contexts.
This is echoed by the report by CRE Research for Creative and Cultural Skills (CC Skills) and Arts Council England (ACE), which reveals that 33% of creative businesses identified a skills gap, with the most common gaps being in business marketing and communication skills (53%), and general problem-solving skills (48%). 44% of businesses identified a fundraising skills gap.
This makes the industry’s experts and leaders express their concern about whether higher education institutions are adequately preparing students for careers in art and design. With 66% of recent art school graduates carrying substantial debt as the cost of art degrees increases, students expect their institutions to prepare them with entrepreneurial skills to find or establish creative careers and teach them how to live creative lives. The shift for artist’s independence and a considerable change in the way artists pursue their creative career mean that the conventional approach adopted in education of creatives — the “just focus on your art as if the money part does not exist” approach – should give way to new paradigms.
While the incredible success of the UK’s art and cultural sector, which brings hundreds billion pounds to the country’s economy, has resulted in a desperate need for managerial skills in creative industry, only a few arts and design schools and career service departments are taking note, offering courses in creative and professional practice as well as entrepreneurship. For example, in Australia, UNSW Art & Design has rethought its design degree, encouraging students to be entrepreneurial in their thinking. The university even offers a start-up accelerator that provides art and design students opportunities to incubate new business ideas.
In the meantime, only 34% of recent art school alumni believe their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills during the years of their education. Another survey initiated by US’s Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) shows that 71% of arts graduates indicated managerial skills were “Very” or “Somewhat important” to their profession or work life but only 26% of alumni reported their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills “Some” or “Very much.” In total, the difference between these responses was 45%, leaving a substantial gap between the reported need for managerial skills and the number of alumni who feel they attained them at their institution.
According to the research by Alec Dudson, founder of Intern Magazine, nine out of ten creative students say they do not even receive any insight into how to price their work, which leads to them being exploited early in the career, either as a freelancer or working in-house. Dudson points it out that only few art and design programmes have a ‘professional practice’ module embedded and even if they do, it seldom runs across each of the three years. In cases where there is no module-level provision, career departments and employability teams are left to pick up the slack, while being restricted to sign-up sessions and ‘employability weeks’.
In addition to developing artistic techniques, contemporary artists have to master managerial, financial, and organizational skills that are essential to manage the business side of their creative practice, early on in their art school education. The fundamental list of skills includes business and career planning tools, strategies to market and sell their work, basic budgeting and financial management, legal requirements for protecting creative works, communication and negotiation skills, and networking tools to succeed in the digital world.
Holding both an MBA and an MFA in painting, Amy Whitaker, Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture and an author outside of academia, believes that teaching business to artist should be, however, broader than merely teaching them how to market their work. Her approach comprises presenting business as a set of structural tools and building blocks that anyone can use in service of their larger, non-business lives. She encourages creative students to embrace business not as “an identity or a belief system, but a skill — like writing or calculating or drawing.” “Like any other medium — wood, oil paint, steel — capitalism has strengths and weaknesses,” she writes. “It is only by understanding those possibilities and limitations that you can use the medium well.”
To thrive in their creative career, artists do not have to become business people but they do need to understand business. This means that art schools and design education institutions must move towards a mode of teaching that properly trains their graduates to navigate the creative industry effectively.