An increase in thinking and talking about long-term aspirations as concerns income ’round these parts has lead to this newest idea: a business plan. Simple.
I’ve been nurturing a strong urge to create and manage an arts space for quite some time now. I realize that this endeavor will require funding, and so the question of how to purse that, REALLY do it, takes over. @Howdiz thinks a business plan is the way to go. Break the low-funding DIY and or grant/ass-licking mould and simply appeal to investors with a break-away powerhouse of an idea about how to monetize artistic talent in a progressively modern way.
So what’s the model? There are multitudes of artists producing and selling goods – t-shirts, zines, clothing & accessories, even work for the lucky ones – but often times these are smaller, independent efforts that are competing with each other in a tight space. The production of goods is an incredibly viable model for creating economic value around the creative act. Today it is clearly the predominant source of arts-related income for young, emerging artists.
But what about services? There is an expansive skill set that exists in the populations of university-trained artists amassing here in Philadelphia that is immense in breadth: from welding and casting, to graphic design, to book arts and narratives, to scene-building and performance, to education, ideation, event planning, creative communications, etc. ad-nauseum. What if there were a way to organize these skill sets? A way to make it easy for young artists to participate as skilled team members, employed full-time on their own terms, engaging their core skill set as a means to salaried pay, with benefits?
I propose a network of artists across the city, whose skills are refined and directed, who train together to work in teams toward a common creative act. This creative act becomes a service offering to the local economy. The line of offerings is marketed aggressively, and executed professionally through the Organization, who has as its disposal resources no individual artist or traditional collective could support.
What would this mean for the artist? Aside from studio and gallery space as part of the locative fact of the Organization, the artist would have guaranteed, salaried employment and benefits, as well as a steady stream of projects that allow them to engage and enrich their technical skills. Instead of working 40 hour weeks in administrative or food service roles, young artists would spend their days immersed in tasks directly related to their true passion – the creative act.
What would be the role of the Organization? Primarily to define the service offerings, create business processes to support the offerings, and invest in communications to ensure a steady stream of projects. The Organization is founded on the principle of ad-hoc teaming and thus has an essential locative element, i.e. a need for a brick-and-mortar anchor.
The location would serve as studio/gallery space, a place for the teams to congregate, work together, and learn from each other. It would also be a communications point with the community as well as the client base, maintaining regular business hours. Further, it would house equipment and resources that would allow the artists to focus time on their work, both creative and income-generating, in one place, bringing the two into harmony in a decidedly modern way.
With all these productive resources in one location (traditional creative resources, along with more logistic-business-process and technology resources) a new era of economic viability for artists will start to emerge.
The first step in starting to outline this a bit further is to understand better the skills that the community possesses and further, to map the needs of the local economy on top of this cleraly-defined skill set. Ideally, the service offerings would not only be competitive with traditional offerings, but would offer a level of skill and expertise that exceeds those traditional offerings.
