Search

To launch Volume 12 of Artivate and mark the editorial team transition, we offer the following set of editorial essays to help catalyze conversations and contributions on the past and future of the field. The first is by outgoing coeditors Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Neville Vakharia, who reflect on the field-building focus of their tenure and some of their key accomplishments. Their excellent retrospective is followed by essays from each of the new coeditors, exploring the origins and nature of their relationship to the field of arts entrepreneurship as well as the evolving topics those origins inspire. We hope that these essays encourage a similar reflection among our community and foster a more expansive conversation and examination of entrepreneurship in the arts.

We invited past, present, and future Artivate editors to contribute to a glossary collectively, futurecasting the central ideas advancing our field. Their provocations shared here help us build forward together.

Editors' Introduction to Issue 10.2

What brings the two halves of our expanded, double issue together, other than rigorous scholarship and shared commitment to our growing field, is this moment of crisis and change. During our editorial process, the world went into quarantine, and like many art scholars we found ourselves asking how the journal’s field-building aims would contribute to the resilience of arts organizations facing an unparalleled crisis. This editorial gathers those voices and shares their message of both distress and hope.

The third installment in our opinion series, “Perspectives,” in which we invite Artivate's editorial board members and contributors to respond to open-ended prompts about: their position in relation to arts entrepreneurship; how arts entrepreneurship is situated in relation to other disciplines or fields; what problems we are grappling with as scholars, practitioners, teachers, and artists; and what are the research questions we are attempting to answer individually or as a field.

Current perspectives and approaches to cultural policy in the United States have overwhelmingly focused on the role of the intermediary – the public and private funders, the policymakers and governments, and the formalized cultural enterprises that all play a part in shaping policy in their own way. Very little has been written or studied about cultural policy from the perspective of the artists, those who are actually creating, performing, and producing the public goods and benefits that cultural policy seeks to shape. In Performing Policy, author Paul Bonin-Rodriguez provides a much-needed perspective on the artist's role both in cultural policy and in 21st-century American society. Bonin-Rodriguez draws extensively from his own experiences as a performing artist, teacher, and scholar to elevate the role of artists in cultural policy and to document their importance in being at the “policy table.” His book is timely and relevant, as expectations of artists' roles have been elevated. Artists are more frequently expected to participate in the creation of social, cultural, and economic capital, though effective policies and practices that collectively support this lofty role are yet to emerge. The author's frequent references to Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital provide grounding for the reader in understanding the overall impact of artists in our communities.