The ‘Artrepreneur’: Artists and Entrepreneurialism

Abstract

This chapter asks what it means, now, to be an artist. It asks partly because the question of what it means to be an artist is relevant to so many people, given the participatory trends in art and performance which the last chapter explored and which increasingly encourage everyone to be artists. But this chapter asks not just who artists are, but what artists are now because current social, economic and political contexts, in England in particular but also more widely in the United Kingdom, are radically reconfiguring what an artist is expected to be and, in so doing, putting the value of being an artist at serious ideological risk.