Reading Creative Business

Creative Business, originally uploaded by wiikkis.

I started reading this book, Creative Business – 10 Lessons To Help You Build A Business Your Way, on the plane back from Berlin. It’s a really quick and easy read, but brings up some interesting points about building your own business within arts and culture. And It has short stories with cases from the Nordic countries to complement and support the points that are made.

The book is CC licensed and you can read parts of it here.

And this weekend I started making notes from it. Here you can see part of them. I’ll post the whole thing when it’s ready.

Swamp

I’ve been in a swamp of work, work, more work and then some thesis work. But last night I finally finished my thesis text. The basis is now there. Some final comments from supervisors etc. may cause some changes, but it’s all there now. So relieved!

So you already saw a first picture from my thesis. Here’s the next one:

The art work in community art is the working process with the community and the artist together.

Speaking of the power of pictures…

So this autumn I’m also writing my bachelor’s thesis for arts management at Novia University of Applied Sciences. I’m writing about community arts/sociocultural projects and why there should be arts managers as part of the team in those projects. I’ll post the whole thing here when it’s ready…

Sociocultural projects focus on the development of individuals. Part of a drawing for my bachelor's thesis.

But anyway, about the power of pictures. Part of my thesis is about visualizations and visual thinking (not necessarily the same thing…) and last week I got Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. The book I think has saved my thesis mostly because it got me working on it again after a long period of not finding where to continue writing. So while I was reading I started scribbling in the margins of the book and later on I continued working on the pictures, and now it looks like they will be part of my thesis.

And working on the pictures got me writing again, too. That’s what I call power of pictures :P

How to work in a network?

Norbert Schmidt on the Creative Network Economy and the main things that play into it.

I’m part of a network project called Produforum and today we had a discussion about it from the point of Creative Network Economy, my friend Norbert’s thesis (download here) on the subject with Produforum as the case.

Discussions were surrounding openness, who’s the network for, what are the inputs and the outcomes of individual members and how does this relate to the marked based economy outside of the network and even further how can we deal with the tax office when we are working like this without them getting all the money and we none? A lot of questions and not so many answers. What you could see was that there are many opinions and the network is different for everyone.

For me it’s okay that we don’t exactly know everything and that this is just a platform to test different ideas (that’s what the EU money is for, anyway), but after being involved with the network for a couple of years through my studies and only last spring becoming a member I’ve only started to realize how hard it is to try to create your own system of working within an already existing on, the network based one within the market based one, when you are working freelance. You still have to get that money from somewhere.

I also see the similarities between Produforum and To Culture With Love. Isn’t the ultimate goal the same in both of them? What makes them different? And should they be more focused? When you are trying to work for better working conditions for professionals within arts and culture, are you taking too big of a bite? Can you actually work for everyone? Is that realistic or is that just another utopia?

Conceptual art = Arts management?

This weekend I was in Berlin for a meeting where we were planning the future organization for To Culture With Love. Management and more. We have new members in the team and our discussions were circling around values, target group, mission etc. The new members are artists who are involved with an organization called X Presents and they’re working for similar things that we are in To Culture With Love.

Our workshop has been specifically aimed at people within cultural work/arts management, but the X Presents girls felt excluded because they don’t identify with those although they actually do work with management things. So after hours and hours of discussing I had a thought; maybe the things we’re doing within To Culture With Love, creating utopias about what working should be like in the arts and cultural field and in our society are actually conceptual art.

If conceptual art is about ideas and concepts more than aesthetics and materials then To Cultre With Love and the work that we do can definitely be considered art. So, besides being an arts manager and hobby artist (I paint and make jewllery) I’m an actual artist. I’m going to start calling myself artiste (pronounced in the French way).

Hmmm… I need new business cards :P