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VOL. 11, NO. 1 
SPRING 2022 

 

BOOK REVIEW 

The Artful Manager: Field Notes on the Business of 
Arts and Culture by E. Andrew Taylor 

 

Michael DeWhatley  
University of Texas at Austin 

  

ABSTRACT: Michael DeWhatley reviews The Artful Manager: Field Notes on the 
Business of Arts and Culture by E. Andrew Taylor. KEYWORDS: arts management, 
advice, management techniques, organizational purpose, mission statement, values 
statement, structure and strategy, innovation, nonprofit management, aesthetic 
practice, book review, review. DOI:doi.org/10.34053/artivate.11.1.175 

In striving to express who we are and what we see, we learn who we are and 
what we see. And through creative expression and experience, we have an 
astounding opportunity to share that vision and effort with each other (p. ). 

The multidimensional challenges arts managers have faced in the last two years—and continue 
to encounter—including not only the COVID- pandemic but also the necessary struggle for 
racial justice, are immense. In times like these, we are all in need of inspiration and new ideas 
for how we may adapt or cope with our shifting reality. E. Andrew Taylor’s book, The Artful 
Manager: Field Notes on the Business of Arts and Culture (arts axis press, ), provides that 
necessary inspiration in the course of its chapters, though the work is considerably broader than 
it is deep.  



ARTIVATE 11.1 

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 The Artful Manager is a curated compilation of fifty excerpts from Taylor’s blog of the 
same name.1 These blog entries have been updated and organized into three sections as Taylor 
explores management techniques, organizational purpose, and structures and strategies for arts 
groups. Most of these chapters are quite short, two or three pages, and for the most part they 
represent the author’s philosophies rather than data-driven reports or deeply cited theory. 
However, these entries come from the voice and experience of an industry expert. Despite their 
brevity, Taylor’s entries have something to say.  

 The first section contains eighteen chapters focused on management practice and, 
taken as a whole, it seems to call for a revitalization of arts management as an aesthetic practice. 
Taylor asks managers to resist classical forms of tension with artists in organizational 
environments. Instead, many of these chapters call for arts managers to develop some form of 
“aesthetic attention” or to be in some way partners in artistic experience with everyone involved 
in their organization (p. ). These first eighteen chapters present portals to new ways of 
thinking that develop managers with creative expression as part of their vocabulary and 
intentionality.  

 Taylor’s second collection of fifteen chapters is also focused on intention, but at an 
organizational and field level as opposed to the individual. Titled “Purpose and Value,” this 
section investigates basic components of nonprofit management. With a nominal focus, this 
section gives an overview of perceived and literal ownership in the arts. Of the three, this section 
also feels the most scattered. For instance, one chapter reflects a sardonic hope for the time spent 
in academic conferences, with the next offering a eulogy for the late Al Prieve, who was the 
Chair of the Management Department at the University of Wisconsin Madison as well as the 
founder of The Bolz Center for Arts Administration. Connecting the content of these chapters 
to the section’s titular theme is a bit of a literary stretch.  

 The final section of the book revolves around “Structure and Strategy,” with Taylor 
calling for increased flexibility in how artistic organizations are formed and sustained over time. 
For instance, the chapter “A Hammer or a Sponge?” invites arts managers to investigate more 
meaningfully what their organizations are trying to achieve; metaphorically, are they striving to 
drive in a nail or soak up water? The focus in these chapters seems to be more entrepreneurial 
than managerial. Taylor asks questions that are more relevant to people looking to begin artistic 
enterprises than those who are already working at established institutions.  

 These chapters, when given space for reflection, can lead readers to a contemplative 
mindset in which they might apply Taylor’s insights to their own work, like an intellectual 
devotional. The book tightly compresses ideas from organizational theorists, philosophers, 
economists, and others into bite-sized chunks, which is especially useful as a primer on their 
overall bodies of work. Rich in metaphor, The Artful Manager borrows liberally from an 
extensive archive of thinkers, poets, and even arts managers; and it often extends the initial 
thought to a new level. Indeed, part of Taylor’s intention with this book, revealed in his 

 
1 https://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/ 



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prologue, is a desire to shift the “language, lenses and assumptions of arts management” with 
new metaphor and conceptual illustration (p. ix). To that end, this book does present the reader 
with a codex of both established concepts and potential new avenues of thought. For non-
academic readers or audiences who are looking for practical and insightful entries on topics 
related to artistic management and entrepreneurship, The Artful Manager is the book they have 
been waiting for.  

At the same time, this book lacks cohesion or an editorial voice that might otherwise give 
it a more intentional throughline. While The Artful Manager has an introduction in the form of 
a prologue, it is less than two full pages and contains three paragraphs that are also stated 
verbatim in Chapter . Perhaps new material—not available online—that could introduce the 
concepts and selections found in each section would have helped codify The Artful Manager 
and given greater weight to its relatively light chapters. Additionally, and perhaps related to its 
publishing timeline, this  book offers no insights or guidance that speak directly to our 
continuing realities around the COVID- pandemic. More problematically, none of the 
chapters meaningfully deal with the subject of racial equity. In Chapter , Taylor speaks to bias 
in terms of individuals prioritizing the mind over the body, but he does not have anything to 
say in fifty chapters regarding the fact that arts entrepreneurship and management privileges 
some bodies more than others. The Artful Manager can move from innovative to outdated by 
refusing to engage in topics of arts management that feel most pressing at the time of its 
publication as a whole book rather than a series of online essays that began in .  

As field notes go, these re-published blog posts represent the conversational style of the 
internet, a place where no one has the final word but where there are many first words. Perhaps 
that is Taylor’s true gift in these pages: the beginning of fifty important conversations. There is 
certainly value in Taylor’s new metaphors and the introduction of ideas from other fields into 
arts entrepreneurship that may prove useful to managers seeking to be artful. Indeed, the 
endnotes section at the end of the book could provide a reading list for anyone who wants to get 
an MBA in arts administration without paying tuition. Casual readers—or anyone interested in 
primers on arts management topics, debates, and continuing explorations—will find this book 
helpful and illuminating.  
 
Disclosure Notice: E. Andrew Taylor, the author of The Artful Manager, is also a member of Artivate’s editorial board. 


