Enterprise UK Blog

I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, where I got to thinking about art and enterprise. There were loads of authors at the Festival who were sponsored by a company – Sean Connery by Highland Park, Wendy Cope by Green Mountain Coffee, Irvine Welsh by KPMG… I spoke to some friends who found the huge visibility of certain businesses at a literary festival a bit odd. “By sponsoring an author, they think they’re making their company better,” one of them said. “But they’re just making books worse.”

It’s a question I’ve been pondering over for a while. Why are some people so uncomfortable with the idea of art and enterprise in cooperation? It doesn’t seem impossible to me that art can be commercially viable, or that business can be culturally enriching. Maybe there’s an old-fashioned idea that you can’t be a good artist (whatever that means) and an entrepreneur, as if the values of art and business have to be in opposition. In Terry Pratchett’s ‘Masquerade’, a cheese making entrepreneur buys an opera house and is horrified to learn that nobody makes money from opera. You put money in, you get opera out, one of his new employees tells him. Just Googled the rest of the scene…

“What’d I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I’d like to know, if I’d said that money wasn’t important?”
Salzella smiled humourlessly. “There are people out on the stage right now, sir,” he said, “who’d say that you would probably have made better cheeses.”

In ‘Masquerade’, art (opera) and business (cheese) are by definition opposites, and nobody can be good at both… But let’s not get a novel mixed up with real life. Besides, I’m not convinced that a really good bit of cheese isn’t art. I like cheese.

Proving that an artistic temperament and a head for business are not mutually exclusive, Suzy Crowe uses her business contacts to promote young artists, Paul Fisher is organising the largest ever artistic collaboration to raise money for charity (combining art, business and social enterprise!), and Preethi Nair signed a three book deal after setting up her own PR company to make sure people knew about her writing. There’s a world of enterprising artists and artistic entrepreneurs out there, and it’s time to get rid of the horribly out of date idea that creativity and business sense don’t mix.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Creative Industries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.