“Artist Entrepreneur” is a an oxymoron…if you are a real artist you are not an entrepreneur, you are at best a creative business man.
It is like saying priests and rabbis should be business savvy to stay alive…How long do you think it would take for them to lose sight of God?
Or does that even matter to the materialistic society we live in?
It is time artists were acknowledged for creating visuals that help transcend this bleak and brutal world because they communicate with their souls, not yet jaded by the marketplace. Even Jesus threw out the moneychangers from the temples, due to that activity being incompatible with spiritual life.
Art should be given a chance to thrive in a space similar to a temple, where spirit and creativity combine to produce an inspiration for the people. Instead it is all about making artists into moneychangers.
And if not, then at least let them be useful as community activists with what they create, so moneychangers in our our society are telling artists what to create, soul be damn! The clink of coins is music to the ears of all the art administrators in Canada, who are making a living dictating to the artists and bullying them into paths they normally would not go on but for the fact that they have to eat.
A sorry state of affairs I say…when help for artists is conditional on them becoming business tycoons and community developers, with no time for soul searching which is what art is really about. Then when their souls dry up from internal tears over the years, what is left? Kitsch of course, what else can they produce in that diminished capacity! And people don 't understand the difference between the word "Art" and "Creativity", creativity can be in any profession, art is a profession in and of itself.