Lingo & Tepper (2013) — "Looking Back, Looking Forward"

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Key Ideas

Across this literature, the artist’s role evolves from autonomous creator to adaptive, entrepreneurial, and socially engaged worker. They must master uncertainty, synthesize skills across disciplines, and build communities in a system that simultaneously empowers and exploits them.

Uncertainty and Precarity in the Cultural Sector

Both institutions and artists cope with precarity through flexibility, diversification, and reputation-building.

  • Organizations manage this by adopting project-based structures, using short-term contracts to stay flexible and reduce overhead (Storey, Salaman, & Platman, 2005).

  • Artists, in turn, manage instability—marked by unemployment and underemployment—through multi-job careers, continuous learning, and maintaining broad social networks to access opportunities (Bridgstock, 2005; O’Mahony & Bechky, 2006; Throsby & Zednik, 2011).

  • The art world is marked by oversupply, project-based work, and unpredictability, where success often appears accidental (Bielby & Bielby, 1994; Menger, 1999).

From Romanticism to Cultural Industries

The historic divide between art and commerce has eroded, creating hybrid forms of production and taste.

Historically, artists positioned themselves as rebels outside the market economy (Røyseng, Mangset, & Borgen, 2007). Yet over time, cultural production has become industrialized:

  • In the 20th century, art shifted from studio craft to corporate production, supported by national markets and new technologies (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944; Becker, 1984).

  • Becker (1984) highlights the specialization of late-20th-century art worlds, exemplified by the extensive credits in film production.

  • American elites institutionalized cultural prestige through nonprofit high-culture institutions—museums, orchestras, and theaters—reinforcing class hierarchies and separating “high” from “popular” art (DiMaggio, 1982).

However, these distinctions are breaking down: consumers increasingly exhibit “omnivorous” tastes, appreciating both elite and popular art (Peterson & Kern, 1996).

Artists as Economic Drivers

Artists are now positioned as central to the “creative economy,” blurring lines between art, work, and entrepreneurship.

Governments now frame artists as key contributors to economic growth and innovation in the post-industrial, global economy (Florida, 2012; Howkins, 2002).

  • Cultural and creative industries are viewed as vital to GDP, prompting policies to nurture creative talent (DCMS, 2006, 2008).

  • The NEA’s recent shift reframes artists explicitly as “workers” who create economic as well as cultural value (Iyengar, 2013).

Portfolio Careers and Hybrid Skill Sets

Modern artistic careers are protean and multi-directional (Hall, 2004; Inkson, 2006).

  • Success depends on meta-competencies: creative versatility, commercial acumen, and cross-platform fluency (Bridgstock, 2011; McRobbie, 2004b).

  • Many artists willingly work across roles and disciplines, and interdisciplinary art programs are among the most popular today (Throsby & Zednik, 2011; Fendrich, 2005).

  • Bridgstock (2005) describes a shift from employment security to employability, emphasizing adaptable, multi-skilled workers.

Socially Engaged and Community-Oriented Practices

Recent scholarship identifies a growing trend toward social engagement in artistic work:

  • Many artists see themselves not just as creators but as educators, social workers, and community actors (Lena & Cornfield, 2008; Simonds, 2013).

  • The tradition of the “teaching artist” has deep roots, from Jane Addams’s Hull House to contemporary arts education (Rabkin, 2013).

  • Social practice art blurs the boundaries between activism, performance, and community organizing—often outside traditional art institutions (Kennedy, 2013).

Yet, this field faces institutional challenges: most artists lack training for social work, and funders are not equipped to support hybrid art–social initiatives (Brown & Tepper, 2012).

Precarity and the Post-Fordist Economy

Artists are often portrayed as casualties of post-Fordist capitalism—bearing economic risks once absorbed by employers (Bain & McLean, 2013; McRobbie, 2002).
They self-fund education, juggle multiple jobs, and lack stable benefits, embodying the ideal of the flexible, self-managing worker.

It seems there were two roads that the designers were confronted with choice: either march alongside post-Fordist capitalism (as successful entrepreneurs) or become its exploited subjects (as precarious laborers).

Entrepreneurship, DIY Culture, and Technological Tools

New technologies enable artists to become “personal factories,” managing their own creative production from concept to market.

A shift is occurring where individual creators hire capital—outsourcing management, production, and promotion services to realize self-directed projects.

[!NOTE] Hiring capital by designers Is this broadly true, or limited to a few success stories (e.g., generative coding communities)?

The “New DIY” ethos (Billboard, July 6 issue) celebrates artists as self-contained production units—recording, distributing, promoting, and selling directly via digital platforms (Nagy, 2013).

[!NOTE] Reflects the rise of personal creative autonomy and parallels trends in open-source AI and local model development.

Many “off-center” artists build careers translocally, maintaining connections to global networks while strengthening local scenes.
They must balance specialization and generalist skills, autonomy and collaboration, artistic ideals and commercial realities.
Cornfield (in press) argues that artists are catalysts of innovation, creating new professional identities and market niches (Baker & Faulkner, 1991).

Community, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurial Creativity

Cornfield’s forthcoming book Agents of a Changing Art World explores entrepreneurial artists building communities through businesses and nonprofits that support others (career development, legal, and policy advocacy).
This collaborative entrepreneurship raises key questions:

  • Who supports artists as they experiment?

  • Where does community now reside?

Changing Modes of Production and Education

The future of artistic practice lies in hybrid education and collaborative infrastructures that merge creativity with entrepreneurial and technological skill.

[!NOTE] Question How privileged is that to receive this kind of hybrid education and have access to this collaborative infrastructures?

Digital tools have transformed workflows: musicians now record remotely and collaborate online.
Educational models, such as Philadelphia University’s Strategic Design MBA, emphasize integrative thinking, user-centered design, and rapid prototyping, aligning artistic creativity with innovation and business strategy.

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