Perusing my RSS Feeds this morning, I came across some commentary by Andy Parkinson about a post on What Entrepreneurship Is and Isn’t, with this excerpt:

True entrepreneurship involves the creation of processes, not just the creation of work. If you’ve created a project that requires continual inputs from you and relies on your own work to keep all the plates in the air, congratulations! You have just built a job for yourself. Yes, you have built a job, and maybe even a better job than most people have—but it’s a job, not a business.

A business earns money while you sleep and while you are on vacation. A business is an asset that can be bought and sold. A true business is largely independent of its owner, although of course this is a matter of degree and only rarely is 100% independent. Therefore, entrepreneurs pay close attention to the creation of processes that will eventually allow themselves to focus on what they’re best at, or perhaps even leave the operation entirely.

It got me thinking about art as a business. Reading this, it seems that the goal of creating an entrepreneurship is to create an entity that will run and function without your help. With this sort of definition for entrepreneurship, how does art-making fit into things? Making a living as an artist is a job that requires constant maintenance. You have to produce work constantly and market it constantly. In the old days, if you were lucky you could get a good gallery representative to take care of the “business” end of things, while the artist does what artists are good at: holing up in the studio and making art. The fact is that art-making is 100%, entirely dependent on the artist. Artists are usually willing to do the work, knowing that it can never be a nine-to-five thing, and they’re fine with that. But it certainly isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of thing. It never will be, unless you make something that can be licensed.

I’m no MBA, but it seems to me that there are two very broad categories of businesses: those that sell inventory (literal or virtual), and those that offer services.

Inventory

For an artist, the conventional idea of “inventory” is a joke unless you make multiples (original prints, cast objects, or some other mass-produced item regardless of quantity, handmade or not). Chances are you will have exactly one (1) painting/sculpture/whatever of X. Sure, you might have a series of pieces that are of a similar size, subject matter, and medium, but there’s only one of each. So an inventory-based model doesn’t seem to apply very well to an art business. It’s less tangible for writers, moreso for musicians.

Services

Most inventory-less business are services. You might keep certain supplies in stock, but you don’t sell them. In essence, you rent out your expertise for a set price or a block of time at a certain rate. (That’s how the design industry works: a designer or design firm or agency creates something for a client in exchange for an agreed-upon fee.) If you decide to sell a service business, you are essentially selling your customer base and management of whatever employees you may have.

But making art is not a service. You make something, put it out there, and hope it sells. (Sure, you can do market research to produce something that may sell better, but that makes it a commodity, and it’s status as a piece of art is in question. This works for the fashion industry. The music industry has suffered from this same “research,” resulting in an increase in blandness and a decrease in innovation.)

Neither knowledge work nor manual labor

It’s all fuzzy. Art is an intellectual creation. It’s akin to the development of “knowledge work,” yet art-making as a career has been around for several hundred years, and we still haven’t figured out what to do with it. It’s probably less clear than ever, since artists traditionally make something tangible with their hands, taking into account a good deal of theory and education and abstraction. So it’s not quite knowledge-work, and it’s not quite manual labor, either.

Selling an Art Business?

As for the entrepreneurial idea of eventually selling your business, how can you sell your art business? You could possibly sell your workspace for a profit, but used supplies likely won’t break even. The only thing you can really sell is the body of work, or “inventory,” that you’ve produced.

Defying Categorization

I’m starting to see how a government agency like the IRS may have problems working with full-time artists. It’s not a “real” job, and it doesn’t fit any of the standard definitions of a business. Art doesn’t fit into a neat little box, and the making of art doesn’t, either.

Conclusion

This has me thinking we need to revisit the idea of business/entrepreneurship, or otherwise invent a whole new category for working artists. Again, I have to ask my initial question, for which I have no conclusion: how does making art for a living fit into the idea of entrepreneurship? Or does it?