Why Teach Business to Artists?

August 9, 2016 2:01 PM

A widespread lack of understanding of the market — and its role in education, in social unrest, in campaign finance, in economic stability, in protest votes of the disenfranchised against entrenched elites — is one of the greatest threats to modern democracy.
posted by bq (22 comments total)

Others may posit that it's the market itself (and the manner in which it is manipulated) that is the actual greatest threat to modern democracy.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:59 PM on August 9, 2016 [15 favorites]

A market as an abstraction is nothing but an empty game space. The specific cultural norms of the traders, the rules of trade they operate under, and the various kinds and forms of enforcement mechanisms define what any market is and how it functions. Talking and thinking about markets as an abstract without acknowledging markets are a human technology, not a natural system in the way those are usually understood, is about as sensible and useful as talking about the essential features of donut holes as distinct from other forms of empty space.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:20 PM on August 9, 2016 [11 favorites]

I've found myself the strange benificiary of a 'business process' class. I was struck by the hijacking of scientific concepts disguising fuzziness. Is this what was meant by Taylorism?

Business folks applying biz process should be able to unmask the assumptions to understand the system's limitations. From my interactions with most biz types, admittedly not many, there's a striking lack of awareness regarding these assumptions.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 6:23 PM on August 9, 2016 [5 favorites]

I wish this was about 3x as long and went into some actual details about what the author teaches about each of these levels of business. Without meaning to be uncharitable about the article, it reads more like an advertisement for the author's classes than conferring any real information about what the author thinks is important.

Still nice concepts. Business/markets have always felt opaque to me, but I've never bothered to take any classes.
posted by hippybear at 6:42 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

If he said something concrete it might take away from the overall gibberish impression he gives.
posted by Pembquist at 7:31 PM on August 9, 2016

My response was negative for the reasons given-- promotional and abstractions. But I did like:

In the same way that the perfect is the enemy of the good, the quantifiable can be the enemy of the important.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:36 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

And I have enjoyed cross-discipline personalities before. A guest lecture at college had degrees in anthropology and interior design and they spoke about many things, but what I can recall at the moment was a study about a study involving seating arrangements and power hierarchies and leadership conflicts involving gender. They started by illustrating with a fish tank--that fish bloat themselves with air to be the largest to dominate--to parallel what the study indicated about how people sit around a conference table and their proximity to the leader and how changes in a position affect the relationships of power.

Cross-discipline approaches are pretty cool to me and I was excited to follow the link and disappointed by its lack of information.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:45 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Business folks applying biz process should be able to unmask the assumptions to understand the system's limitations. From my interactions with most biz types, admittedly not many, there's a striking lack of awareness regarding these assumptions.

And an early assumption is that you know a lot of stuff because you've made money. Not a great place to start.
posted by sneebler at 9:42 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."-- Andy Warhol
posted by storybored at 9:48 PM on August 9, 2016

I believe that Excel is one of the great inventions of the 20th century

what
posted by benzenedream at 10:48 PM on August 9, 2016

Excel is seriously pretty great. I mean, I have very limited experience with it, but what I did experience was pretty powerful, and I could see there was a lot of things I wasn't even tapping into.

I don't know how it might be applied outside of my own limited experience with it, but I could see how it could be regarded as a major advancement in allowing humans to work with numbers and data of other sort.
posted by hippybear at 11:02 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Spreadsheets could be considered one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Microsoft did not invent the spreadsheet.
posted by benzenedream at 11:13 PM on August 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

This is true. Perhaps Excel is being used generically here, like kleenex or coke.
posted by hippybear at 11:17 PM on August 9, 2016

I believe that Excel VisiCalc is one of the great inventions of the 20th century
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:28 PM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

No, I'm gonna agree with the original author. It was Excel, not VisiCalc, that brought spreadsheet functions to non-math-geek business and minor personal use, to such an extent that anyone with three types of data suddenly had a way to arrange it and keep track of it.

I remember wanting a program, any program, that would let me keep track of names and addresses and phone numbers of people I knew, in about 1992. I wound up with some weird "church database" program that I never could figure out how to use properly; all kinds of database and spreadsheet abilities were Obscure Super-Geek functions.

I'm a Word power user - create styles and templates, set up macros, change the proofreading language and autocorrect options back and forth multiple times in a document - and I would happily shift to a minimal-function program like Abiword for 95% of what I do. (And if it weren't subscription-only and not backwards compatible, use InDesign for everything else.) But Excel was the program that changed my life, changed how I thought about data and information processing.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:21 AM on August 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

I believe that people who actually speak using statements of the form:

I believe that _ is one of the great inventions of _.

Are not likely to be trained technologists, nor have significant first-hand experience in doing science, nor know what they're talking about in this domain, and further, have serious deficits in how to construct and communicate a reasoned argument. I believe we should not believe these people when they talk this way.
posted by polymodus at 2:27 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

(That said, I personally think it's great that some artists might develop an interest in learning about the market [sic] and capitalism, etc., for example to leverage, exploit, subvert, or enhance these social systems, if doing so is something that's compatible with their artistic goals, philosophy, principles, etc. Just don't increase global warming while you're at it, please; the market's pretty bad in that way.)
posted by polymodus at 2:32 AM on August 10, 2016

How do you actually "subvert the market"? If the market is merely a formal mechanism then what would be the difference between "subversion" and "innovation"?

Usually when people claim to be subverting the market they seem to be simply engaging in standard old school monopolistic practices and finding ways to create new barriers to entry for others. Anti-Competitive behaviours are basically market subverting.
- That's what Coke and Pepsi do when they spends $Xmillions on marketing.

It seems like 3.0 would simply mean more effectively turning your artistic activity into an "innovative business".
posted by mary8nne at 6:15 AM on August 10, 2016

I don't think he was stating Excel is literally the greatest invention. He was trying to make a point about his enthusiasm for "business-y stuff", like a sci-fi fan saying Captain Picard is the greatest hero of our generation.
posted by Anonymous at 7:53 AM on August 10, 2016

Everything I know about the business of art, I learnt from the the Rozz Tox Manifesto.

Well. And from reading a lot of people talking about business in the startup scene. And from studying the strategies of people a little more successful with their art than I am. But lately the Rozz Tox has been bouncing around my head enough for me to spend a day making a web page to present it nicely.

I'm finishing my first Kickstarter with a five-digit goal today. I'm close to finishing a proposal for a cartoon series that I have some interesting ideas about using crowdfunding to find a staff and to fund it. Later this month I should get to find out if the group booth I run on the main floor of the Emerald City Comic Con will get to happen again next year, and have plans for bringing it up a few levels.

All this business shit is interesting to play with, and has gotten me to the point where I can mostly pay my rent from art... If I'm spending all my time drawing new comic pages. But I haven't gotten that done for months, in part because of some family issues taking a lot of time, in part because I only have so many hours in the day and business takes time to do.

I look at my friend Dana, who won Universal's comics talent search a few years ago and now has a strip in newspapers all over, an agent, a book deal with Andrews/McMeel, and I am envious of the fact that her only role in this is to draw comics. Everything else happens for her. If I can get to that point I'd be absolutely delighted; business is a royal pain in the ass. Drawing is fun.
posted by egypturnash at 10:12 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was looking at the graphic design program at a local community college (six quarters intensive) and one of the things they had as a class was a basic business and bookkeeping class. I realized that was brilliant because that way you have an idea of it before you really need it if you freelance instead of going into an agency or something like that right off graduation.
posted by mephron at 10:53 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

egypturnash your rozz tox page is great
posted by bukvich at 12:57 PM on August 10, 2016