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VOL. 11, NO. 1 
SPRING 2022 

 

BOOK REVIEW 

Creative Infrastructure: Artists, Money, and 
Entrepreneurial Action 

 

Wen Guo, PhD  
Elon University 

  

ABSTRACT: Centering around three concepts: artists, money, and entrepreneurial 
action, Creative Infrastructure: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action by Linda 
Essig elaborates on essential concepts, competing theories, and diverse perspec-
tives of arts entrepreneurship as both a scholarly field and creative praxis. By eluci-
dating the conundrums and complexities between the principles of the capitalist 
economy and the needs of artists to be flourishing, Essig uses a critical lens to free 
the concept of entrepreneurship and arts from the domination of the hierarchical 
Western-centric social and economic systems, offering a holistic, sustainable, and eq-
uitable approach to perceiving and practicing arts entrepreneur-
ship. KEYWORDS: arts entrepreneurship, neoliberalism, sustainability, equity. 
DOI:doi.org/10.34053/artivate.11.1.173 

Creative Infrastructure: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action by Linda Essig is in many 
respects a remarkable book that, over  pages, thoughtfully discusses and demystifies the key 
issues that make frequent appearances in the burgeoning discourse of arts entrepreneurship as 
both a scholarly field and creative praxis. Centering around three concepts: artists, money, and 
entrepreneurial action, as stated in the subtitle of the book, Creative Infrastructure endeavors to 
address the question, “How can artists make work and thrive in this late-capitalist society?” 
(Essig, , p.). To answer the question, the book uses nine essays to elaborate on essential 
concepts, competing theories, and diverse perspectives concerning underlying rationales, 
behavioral principles, as well as social and cultural contexts of arts entrepreneurship. Each essay 
creates an intellectual space where the author engages in thought-provoking conversations with 
various sources, including classic and recent scholarly publications, artworks, news articles, and 



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government reports, among others. The author also intricately weaves her insightful 
observations and comments into various stories of artists and communities.   

As a former theater professional who attained a doctorate in public administration and 
public policy, Essig integrates her dramaturgical lens and training in stakeholder theory to 
analyze both contextual and behavioral constructs of arts entrepreneurship phenomenon 
through the following questions: What is the economic, social, and cultural context for arts 
entrepreneurship? Who are stakeholders of arts entrepreneurship, and what role do they play 
in both the phenomenon and discourse of arts entrepreneurship? How are artists and other 
stakeholders situated and motivated to take action? How can the arts sector and the late-
capitalist world be transformed for and through arts entrepreneurship? Most importantly, how 
do the power dynamics shape the narrative of arts entrepreneurship and the transforming arts 
sector? Guided by these questions, Essig’s nine essays elucidate the conundrums and 
complexities “between the principles of hierarchy (of capital over labor) and of autonomy” 
(p.), which dictate the relationship between artist individuals and arts institutions, creativity, 
and the economy of scale, as well as neoliberalism and the pursuit of a more equitable world.  

The first essay of Creative Infrastructure offers an elaborate theoretical discussion on the 
ouroboros—the circular image of a snake with its tail in its mouth, common to Ancient Greece 
and Egypt.  Essig first introduced and explicated the image as a metaphor in her well-regarded 
editorial, “The ouroboros of arts entrepreneurship,” in Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship 
in the Arts (). According to Essig, the ouroboros does not represent the drive to accumulate 
capital, which is the essential spirit of capitalism. Instead, the resources accumulated through 
entrepreneurship feed and nourish the head, emblematizing a cycle of artistic survival and 
flourishing. Much like the ouroboros, the book’s nine essays demonstrate how the strategy of 
“buying up, not selling out” plays out in helping artists, organizations, and communities renew 
and sustain their arts practices and cultural production. Essig’s sophisticated deliberation over 
competing perspectives regarding property ownership and capital points to the paradoxes and 
controversies that can emerge when applying neoliberal principles and capitalism tools to 
achieve sustainable, equitable, and community-centered arts practices.  

Essays two and three present an overdue reckoning on how our understanding of art is 
situated in the reality of capitalist society. Taking up a claim from chapter one, Essig begins by 
demonstrating how she sees artists and their audiences connecting through arts 
entrepreneurship. Drawing upon John Dewey and artists in different art disciplines, the author 
asserts that such connection is an inherent attribute of art creation in that artists are intrinsically 
motivated to convey symbolic meaning and value by creating art experiences that interact with 
audiences and their social contexts. Based on the assumption that an economy is a system of 
social interactions where the circulation of goods and services is facilitated by currency (Sharpe, 
), Essig contends that the underlying assumption for the arts economy in capitalist societies 
is that “experience is the currency of art” (p. ). What is most inspiring about this essay is that 
it shifts our focus from the theories of social and economic impact of the arts to the nature of 
art as an infinite and open system with its own wholeness. This holistic view of art allows artists 
and arts organizations to break through the hierarchical, racist, unsustainable, and inequitable 



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capitalist system by reclaiming their autonomy of the production and circulation of their 
creative practices. 

In essay five, Essig draws on the best practices of creative placemaking to discuss the unique 
contributions artists can make to changing the perpetuating inequities in the late-capitalism 
society.  In this essay she shows how artists, through their creative processes and products can 
make a significant, positive impact on not only cultural communities but also their material and 
artistic sustainability.  

While the first five essays elucidate the underlying assumptions and fundamental 
conceptual constellations of arts entrepreneurship, essays six, seven, and eight zoom in for a 
close-up of controversies and challenges facing the concept of “arts entrepreneurship” as actions 
and “arts entrepreneur” as an identity. One of the key contributions of this essay is the wake-up 
call for policymakers, institutions, and artists to stop only taking the very few artists who have 
achieved stardom as the models of successful working artists. Instead, they should encourage 
and support the broad middle-rank artists who do not benefit from the “winners take all” arts 
economy (Menger, ; Caves, ) needed to take entrepreneurial action. Essig argues, “It 
is these artists, the artists in the middle, who can serve the social good, create excellent work, 
and critique the economic system in a meaningful way” (p. ). As an educator who teaches an 
arts entrepreneurship course in my institution, what I enjoyed reading most in the last few 
essays are the lived experiences of artists and the embodied pedagogies of Essig. They 
demonstrate that the most fundamental units of entrepreneurial action for individual artists 
may be rooted in their artistic ways of observing, thinking, and making. 

Of course, as one of the most disruptive events in the past three years, COVID- 
demonstrates the vulnerability of the neoliberal market system and the resilience of artists at the 
same time. By emphasizing the inequities created by the neoliberal free market with more 
examples in essay eight, the author further discusses how artists leverage the systemic inequities 
by taking advantage of their abundant creative assets and how they circumvent the precarity by 
connecting their creative work with audiences or by harnessing the tools of neoliberalism, such 
as presales, resource-sharing, and union-based collective action. 

I found this book an intellectual delight for scholars, teachers, and artists who want to 
develop a systemic and comprehensive understanding of arts entrepreneurship as an academic 
field; a social, economic, and cultural phenomenon; or simply a term full of controversies and 
possibilities. For scholars interested in contributing to the scholarly work of arts 
entrepreneurship, this book can be viewed as a compass of the most significant conversations 
and theoretical constructs. For educators, this book clarifies the theoretical rationales and 
practical pathways for curriculum and pedagogical development of arts entrepreneurship as a 
specialized field connected to but fundamentally different from the entrepreneurship training 
of business schools. Although “critiques of neoliberalism tend to rely on and reproduce the 
coloniality of knowledge” (Kangas & Salmenniemi, , p. ), the author’s contemplation of 
the relationship between art, artist, inequity, and capitalism offers an opportunity for 
“entrepreneurship” and “arts” shackled by hierarchical, Western-centric social and economic 
systems to reclaim their freedom. Essig’s insightful piece of work is a bold reimagination of non-



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capitalist ways of living, creating, and influencing for artists. 

References 

Caves, R. E. (2000). Creative industries: Contracts 
between art and commerce (No. 20). Harvard 
University Press. 

Essig, L. (2021). Creative infrastructures: Artists, money 
and entrepreneurial action. Intellect Books. 

Kangas, A., & Salmenniemi, S. (2016). Decolonizing 
knowledge: Neoliberalism beyond the three worlds. 
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 17(2), 210–227. 

Menger, P. M. (2014). The Economics of Creativity: Art 
and Achievement under Uncertainty (S. Rendall, A. 
Jacobs, A. Dorval, L. Eskinazi, E. Saada, & J. 
Karaganis, Trans.). Harvard University Press. 

Sharpe, B. (2010). Economies of life: Patterns of health 
and wealth. Axminster. Triarchy Press/International 
Futures Forum.

 


