Seminar: Blog Post #1

Amit Gupta and Tim Leberecht’s articles are in agreeance over the conclusion that artists are in fact entrepreneurs, having reached that fact through the comparison between what art and innovation are at their core.

Though the majority of both articles were written from either what entrepreneurs can learn from artists or how the two simply relate, from switching the standpoint, it becomes apparent that the main thing artists should realize is that art is not a passion to be taken lightly, and is not only much more tedious than other professions (in an overall general sense), but the definitions between the artist’s life and job are immeasurably blurred. As such, art is not a profession to be thought of as abstract or “apart” from either the artist or work as a whole, and is rather the same as the amount of work that goes in to being an entrepreneur. In congruence, art is not a subject to tackle alone, but instead is one that requires (for the best probability of success) a social network of people to help the artist grow.

Just as entrepreneuring is to organize and operate business(es), taking extraordinary financial risks to do so, such is the way of art. The only thing artists have to combat against others is their intuition and innovation, and in order to continue creating and evolving, they require the necessity to expand their horizons and see the world in a different light that will make them unique to all others. This will either raze or preserve their image (and as such their social construct), seen with how Vincent Van Gogh painted in a way unique to him, which could be argued to have revolutionized art for future generations as more people began to get a different idea for what art could qualify as, yet at the time when he was creating his pieces, the vast majority of people considered his art to be reckless and ugly.

I believe that artists not only rely on their intuition, but also are comfortable with ambiguity, are great storytellers, thrive under constraints, and are humanists. All the other ideas can fall as a subcategory into one of these five ideals.

I would add to this list my own ideals, of which are the facts that artists have the ability to convey broad or contrary ideas within a greatly simplified space, and as such are able to paraphrase and thus better understand in their own mind (and communicate to a much more massive group of people) subjects that are difficult to grasp.