Entrepreneurship in art institutions

Entrepreneurship for artists is a must and not a privilege.

I am concerned that our art institutions do not incorporate entrepreneurship to the courses / workshops that they offer to aspiring artists. There is no use to produce a good dancer or painter who expects to be employed. These artists end up doing odd jobs here and there for the sake of surviving and as time goes they loose the sense of being artist.

The very same art institutions that teaches them how to dance, should also teach them how to write proposals for funding. Proposal writing should be facilitated by fund raising managers – so there is no excuse that there is NO BUDGET (famous excuse that NGO’s utter – sic). Our country needs more entrepreneurs and more self sustaining artists. Entrepreneurial artists will be able to create jobs by employing 2 or more people in their art projects and some can even open their own training institutions.

As part of their curriculum, entrepreneuship / busisess management should be incorporate in the curriculum. In a case where someone is attending photography classes or dances classes for a year or 2 years, business management workshops should be incorporated somewhere. These business management skills will make a difference in the lives of the trained photographer or a dancer. Most of these art institutions are NGO’s (profesional begging organisations) run and managed by skilled people. Why these people dont share with the artists how to write proposals and starting their own NGO’s too?

Some of these organisation they produce artists who end up working for these organisations and not even exploring their talent out there and challenge the issues with their art.  Very few of these art institutions produce self sustaining artists. It is sad and they kill our art for their greediness. My view is that they do not want to teach the artists to be self sustaining so that they can be able to exploit and exploit them. In johannesburg, newtown – there are a good example of such organisations. If you can go to them and ask to look at their programme offering, very few offer business management or how to start and run a successfull NGO.

How can an institution make an artist an administrator? Why can they hire professional administrators and let the artist develop and hone their art skills further? Are these institutions taking advantage of desperate and hungry artists? If someone does not make noise about this, then we will have few artists who succeed and create their own names in the industry. Our country deserve to have more creative people who are very entrepreneurial.  It does not mean if they teach me photography, printmaking, music or dance I will be able to sell my art to the outside market. The very same institutions makes us artists to feel vulnerable and go back to them and work for them. This strategy enriches them, hence they will give a better excuse why they will not teach business management as part of the programme. We dont just need good dancers or photographers or printmakers, we need good dancers who can create employment and open more and more of art training institutions.

Art institutions should stop being greedy and exploiting artists, they MUST help artists to grow and be themselves. Strategies of starting and running a successful art institutions must be departed to those who complete art programmes.

To our success,

Baleseng ‘Basi’ Tau

Entrepreneur, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Speaker

E-mail: tau@taa.co.za

Skype: basi.tau