There has been some trepidation among members of the Kentucky arts community following the governor’s recent dismissal and reconstitution of the state arts council. Gov. Bevin dismissed all but four of the council members, reduced the size of the council from 16 to 15 and accepted the resignation of the executive director according to a recent report.
The main cause of concern is the arts council’s newly stated focus,
In a news release, Secretary of the Cabinet of Tourism, Arts and Heritage Don Parkinson wrote: “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”
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“The reorganized council strikes the appropriate balance of expertise in the arts and entrepreneurship,” he said. “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”
A more explicit entrepreneurial focus may seem innocuous …. But some worry the shift misconstrues an artist’s role in his or her community.
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“Crafts, sculpture and paintings, for example — and Bevin simply plans to amplify that relatively narrow and crude approach to the arts,” Day says. “This assumes, with such deep misguidedness, that the primary value of the arts is the price they demand.”
This revisits a oft-discussed topic of this blog, what is the purpose and value of art?
Perhaps more immediately for me, I realized how the call for artists to be more entrepreneurial can very quickly be leveraged to the detriment of the arts and culture community.
When I have invoked “entrepreneurial” in the past it was with the intention that those in the arts community acquire the skills to manage their careers, not be cheated by others and make opportunities for themselves rather than wait for it to be provided by others.
In the context of this story, the same terminology almost sounds like, “helping artists make a constructive contribution to society.”
Certainly the execution doesn’t have to be that cynical. Arts Business incubators could be a boon for many communities provided they were sited in rural and other underserved areas employing a model similar to Kentucky’s Appalshop, rather just in places real estate developers wanted to gentrify.
It was instructive for me to have ideas and language I and others have used in relations to arts practice essentially repeated back to me. There is often a line that pops up in television and film comedies that goes something like “well now that I hear it said aloud like that, yes, I guess it is a little ridiculous.”
I am not saying the idea that people should acquire a set of entrepreneurial skills is silly. Rather, hearing the same terminology used in this case makes it clear that when efforts and initiatives for the arts are discussed, care must be taken to provide clear context and definition of the primary value that will result. Economic, intellectual, social, spiritual, etc. benefits may accrue, but the core creative expression has value independent, and regardless of, whether any of these benefits emerge.
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