Teaching Entrepreneurship: Blending Art and Business

Posted on February 11, 2014 by VH Team            

I recently returned from the annual meeting of the USASBE (United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship), held this year in Fort Worth, Texas. And I came back with a renewed appreciation of the challenge of teaching entrepreneurship to young artists.

I’ve long believed that art students need entrepreneurship classes as part of their undergraduate education. After they leave school, they will need the skills of an entrepreneur in order to sell themselves and their art. Sadly and too often, their youth and artistic natures leave little desire for grasping basic business principles.

In my own teaching of art students, I’ve experienced that kind of aversion to entrepreneur education. And my experience is not unique. In my conversations with academics and entrepreneurs at the 2014 USASBE, I heard that the challenge of blending entrepreneurship and art is one faced by independent art and design colleges as well as by art departments in major universities.

While they are students, artists want to focus on creating art, not merchandising it. And yet, after a year or two of bumping into reality once they’re out of school, art grads are saying, “I wish I had learned more about being an entrepreneur, because now that’s what I am. I’ve got to sell my stuff.”

And that’s the real challenge: selling the value of an entrepreneurship curriculum to students who would rather be studying something else. We believe that art students, like any other undergraduates, should be engaged in higher education from a career perspective. Whether they pursue that career as independent fine artists or as free-lance commercial artists, they will need an introduction to entrepreneurship in order to get a proper return on their (or their parents’) college investment. The personal experience of Marc Ecko, a fashion designer turned entrepreneur, demonstrates what we’re talking about, and we use his story in our curriculum.

My own direct experience confirms that young artists tend to be intimidated by the idea of going into “entrepreneurship class.” They are mostly right-brain directed, and are not as comfortable with “systems.” The staple systems of any business – accounting, legal, communications, logistics, etc. – are foreign languages to them and do not blend naturally with an artistic mentality. That’s why we’re exploring innovative approaches to the entrepreneurship curriculum, from restructuring courses to “rebranding” them. If art students have little natural affinity for accounting, why not present it as “Measuring Your Success?” Instead of talking about legal principles, we introduce them to the principles of “Protecting Your Stuff?”

These are just initial ideas that we are exploring at this point. But it shows we’re willing to think like artists – outside the box – in order to reach them and, ultimately, prepare them for the kind of sustainable business success their talents deserve.