Seth Lepore wrote a piece on HowlRound about the need for Artists to Be Entrepreneurs. I thought it was pretty well written and on the mark.
However, I have been feeling extremely frustrated by the response to his column. The amount of retweets of the piece has had me cursing under my breath because it feels like people are just discovering this idea for the first time. I know it has been a continuous topic for the last decade at least. Add to that the common refrain that arts organizations should be run like a business and I have a hard time believing this is a revolutionary notion to anyone.
I was going to start this post with the phrase “Last week Seth Lepore wrote..” because I have been seeing people mention it so much it feels like it has been a week since the post first appeared. It has only been three days.
I don’t usually like to post on topics that are getting a lot of traffic and generating conversation elsewhere. Especially if I don’t have any new insight or counterargument. But I posted a comment on Lepore’s piece saying this topic apparently needs to be discussed more often if it is garnering so much notice.
So here I am, calling additional attention to the issue.
As I suggested, I don’t really have anything to add to what he wrote. Quite honestly, just thinking about this topic is agitating me more than you can imagine and it is difficult for me to calmly compose a post.
Partially this is due to the fact that the anecdotes Lepore relates about the lack of training in these areas are completely familiar to me. I referenced the idea that performing arts training programs aren’t doing enough to train students for careers in a post last month.
Some of the content of that post comes from direct experiences I have had with formal performing arts training programs that don’t train students to manage their own careers. Nor do they encourage students to create and experiment with their own independent projects and few students seem interested or motivated in doing so on their own.
I have worked at a community college without even a certificate program in performance where students had full time jobs, went to school and were taking the initiative to create their own projects and getting involved with other people’s. Some of it stunk, but it got better every year.
I don’t know what motivated one group to create work independently of their instruction and not the others except perhaps that other people around them were already modeling that behavior and inviting them to participate. And perhaps because some of their instructors enabled them by telling the students to bring in some materials and they would show them how to make masks, etc.
But there are plenty of training programs that operate amid those sort of dynamics. As Lepore suggests, a significant contributing factor is likely that faculty never emphasized the value of entrepreneurship, investigating collaborations, etc. They never insisted students learn.
Some will obviously learn by trial and error. Others may never get to a place where they feel like they know how to take control of their careers. Certainly, knowing how to manage and promote yourself well is no guarantee of a successful career. But acquiring these skills will better enable you to understand what is not working and why.
The best suggestion I have for rectifying this situation–for making posts like Lepore’s seem common rather than groundbreaking–is to ask the school you got your arts degree from what they are doing to train their students and enable them to handle their careers. If you didn’t graduate from such a program, (and even if you did), when you meet faculty from other arts training programs, ask them the same thing.
Turn it into one of those buzz/demand generating schemes where people go into a store to ask about a product, then have family and friends call about it, too in order to make it feel like there is an unmet demand for that product.
Which in this case is absolutely true.