Course Description
Objectives
- Honor the dignity of artistic labor in social, psychic, and monetary terms.
- Understand your personal limits and comfort with business and economics and utilize what you need for support and growth.
- Understand your role as a cultural producer is also one of investment (which may or may not have capitalist implications).
- Craft ways to use network externalities and collective action to benefit your creative practice and the field.
- See yourself simultaneously as an artist, a business owner, and a citizen.
- Use economics, imagination, and moral courage in a fight for structural change and equity in the arts.
• Describe markets as a structure and two possible benefits that may support a creative practice.
• Describe how business education can be a creative design medium and result in civic engagement.
• Explain the core logics of economics and finance.
• Explain the concept of efficiency and the challenges the arts pose.
• Explain the concept of inventing a point B world and how that process complicates the concept of value.
• Understand how recent the history of economics is, its context in abstract expressionism and creativity, and the point that it is still in formation.
• Give an example of contemporary, political use of economic principles in a quest for equity and justice in the arts.
• Demonstrate understanding of the interaction between intimate spheres and commercial spheres by explaining “Hostile Worlds” versus “Nothing But” views and the complication of each when applied to the arts (include discussion of motivation).
• List a few examples of structural support using economics that may help creative practice.
• Explain efficiency, resourcefulness, and their relationship to “willful inefficiency” in the arts.
• List several types of investment in the arts.
• Define resale royalties.
• Define opportunity cost and externalities and explain them in relation to your practice.
• Make choices that consider positive, negative, and network externalities in relation to your practice..
• Define Co-Opetition.
• Define Transaction Costs. Explain them in relation to your time management. Design a practice that limits transaction costs.
• Differentiate between Fixed versus Variable Costs; assess your own fixed vs. variable costs.
• Craft a simple income statement mimicking the income statement Amy Whitaker outlines in the video.
• Define Scale and Scope. Identify both in relation to your practice, and utilize economies of scale and scope in your work.
• Explain “value” in relation to your time, thinking, and work in the context of your surroundings and your relationship to a larger field.