Creative Infrastructures

A new collection of connected essays and case studies that delve deeply into the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money.

As in sports, business, and other sectors, the top 1% of artists have disproportionately influenced public expectations for what it means to be a "successful artist." In Creative Infrastructures, Linda Essig takes an unconventional approach and looks at the quotidian artist-and at what they do, not what they make. All too often, artists who are attentive to the "business" of their creative practice are accused of "selling out." But for many working artists, that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission, Essig contends that they don't sell out, they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront. Ultimately, Creative Infrastructures aims to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question "How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?"