Cultural Entrepreneurship & Innovation
- Lecture Notes -
Week 1 Cultural Markets & Creative Competitors
Article 1 Bradshaw & Holbrook (2007) on self-destructive behaviour
Problem: a tension between art and commerce. With self-destruction you can combine
both. And be famous (make a lot of money) and remain your artistic integrity (have an
artistic career). Without losing your legitimacy due to the self-destruction.
Solution: use self-destructiveness to combine art and commerce.
Why would self-destruction help? Get attention, make reasons for people to write about
you. Besides, it might correlate with your storyline, be a part of the themes you sing about
for example. Third, he got popular among people who don’t know much about music. BUT if
it is at that level (where even people without a taste for music will listen to you), you are not
seen as very credible anymore. You will lose your highbrow status. Except when you can
convince people, that is was unplanned to reach these people. You were still there for the
highbrow status people, but you are also picked up by the lowbrow people -> by making use
of self-destructive behavior.
You need to make sure that the highbrow people, know you are not there to make money.
This is why self-destruction supports this. If you are that stupid to self-destruct, this will
make it more believable that you are not there to make money, or change your songs to also
reach lowbrow music people. If you are self-destructive in an open way, it allows you to get
popular, without losing your credibility.
Two extremes within the music industry:
- Pure bohemianism (art for art) = producer as consumer - consumer strategy -
creative integrity. Musicians who perform primarily for themselves. Bride side:
authenticity, creative integrity.
- Pure alienation (art for commercial) = consumer as producer - producer strategy -
pandering. Music purely made for commercial pursuit. Down side: pandering
represents complete subservience (onderdanigheid) to the marketplace.
➢ Many artists escape these extremes by settling for some form of scuffling that
preserves a degree of artistic integrity, while managing to make ends meet in a way
that will avoid starvation. Overcome the fundamental contradiction between
consumer & producer strategy to achieve some degree of self-actualization as an
artist who can satisfy in order to survive, rather than self-destruct. Find a balance.
Pandering: ‘lowering yourself’ as an artist for commercial purposes.
Scuffling: having a second job during daytime (lot of artists found their solution in this).
Legitimizing: keep authenticity & make creative products align with your aspiration, BUT
also for the commercialized crowd → it’s a mix, not 2 separate objectives.
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,Article 2 Dubois (2012) on recognition and renown, the structure of cultural markets
The usual market context often looks different than it actually is. Especially in the highbrow
industries, that are dominated by non-profits. It might not seem like that, but in fact they are
competing a lot (not just for money). The context is in French poetry, where nobody makes
big money. This market does not seem what it looks like. This article looks closely to the
structure of cultural markets and the circulation of works between the two poles of large
and fringe firms.
Why would large publishing houses, also publish small poetries, if you won’t make more
money out of it (commerce vs art)?
- The editors of the publishing houses want to make a profit but also want to stay true
to their selves. This is why they introduce poetries, not for the portfolio, but to allow
the editors to evaluate tweak their job. This is a cheap way to allow an editor to feel
better and express their love for literature.
- Reason two is that sometimes writers start with poetry and then start writing, so you
want them on your side at the early stage.
- Third reason is prestigiousness, you want to be seen as artistically credible.
Creative industries → oligopoly fringe model: large businesses dominate the market,
leaving niches suffer from profits. The upstream selector role of the large business plays a
key role. The two poles in the market:
- Highbrow literature: restricted production, limited appeal, niche markets.
- Lowbrow literature: large scale production, wide appeal, mass-market literature.
➢ Concluding, the market is defined by the Pareto 80/20 principle: 80% of the market
is dominated by 20% or less of the firms.
Selective matching = associations with high-status partners – proves the most efficient
mechanism for building reputation. So majors want big artists to keep their reputation, big
artists want the majors to become renown. In addition, other reputational building
mechanisms such as awards, criticism and media coverage have an important role.
Competition is not about money, but about reputation
Reputation is a category of collective thoughts, a perception. A reputation only has meaning
when it is shared amongst all stakeholders (horizontally). Reputation (the distinction
between recognition and renown) is the reason why successful French poets move from
small time publishers to majors. The reputation of big publishers is stable.
Recognition: people know about you, you have a certain reputation. Minor
publishers and poetries. Reputation an artist enjoys within his original world of art.
- Renown: people who don’t know anything about what you do (in contrast with
recognition), actually know of you. Outside of your local industry, you are known.
Major publishers. These houses make the poet more famous outside their own small
domain. The extension of artists’ reputation beyond his world of art. Economic
benefit: more easy to attract new audience, so you can diversify much easier which
gives you negotiating power.
So, reputation has a chronological dimension: the success in earlier trials is a condition for
success in those to come, called process of legitimation.
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, Stable or unstable reputations:
- Art worlds may need to create reputations that last over time in order to stabilize the
slow-moving markets that would not survive without those at the head of pack.
- The major poets of the time pull the market forward on the strength of their stable
reputations. → By contrast, speculative markets like the contemporary markets for
art or pop music rely on reputations that fluctuate widely in the short term, even if
history will later settle the matter of reputation, as shown in the classical art market.
The selection systems of the visual arts industry: peers → consumers → experts
Italy versus Netherlands:
- Italy: from guild regulated market selection to peer selection (in academy), with a bit
of expert selection, because of art academy. They decide price, status everything.
- Netherlands: from guild regulated market selection to unregulated market selection,
with a bit of expert selection. Status and art were not that much intertwined.
Three marketing strategies in the Dutch golden age:
1. Vermeer: small scale craftsmanship for the local experts.
2. Rubens: large scale production for the courtiers as if they were market consumers.
3. Rembrandt: middle-scale production for market consumers as if they were courtiers.
Article 3 Velthuis (2019) on symbolic meanings of prices
About how art galleries handle the pricing problem. Main point: the Dutch Golden age is
exemplary because it was dominated by market selection: which made not only the quality
of the art important, but also the environment. Which lends itself to the production of a lot
of art. The art was a huge business industry selling millions of paintings.
The discussion between the economic value and the artistic value on pricing art: pricing has
a signifying value: price indicates reputation of artist, social status of dealers and quality.
- Nothing but: prices are nothing but representations of the cultural value. If the price
is high, the painting must be important. The economic value, expresses the other
values. For example: if a painting is worth 100 million, than it must be an important
painting. If a painting is 100 euro, than it is less important.
o Problem: the taboo on price decreases. By lowering the price you also lower
the value of other paintings, so a gallery can never lower the price.
- Hostile worlds: there is no relation between price (economic value) and artistic
value.
o Problem: the gallerists and art collectors pride in how cheap they bought and
how expensive they sold.
→ Both are unworkable, you need to be somewhere in between. The art gallery has to
navigate between these two perspectives in a careful way.
Art and commerce are the opposite. So if you do well in one, you do bad in the other. This
article is about this problem at the level of the retailer (the art gallery), not at the level of the
artist (like Chet Baker or French poets). The difference between an art shop and a simple
commerce shop like Zeeman is the price and the price deals. In an art gallery they are not
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