Find success in a new arts economy.
Hone your skills and reinvent your career.
The twenty-first-century art world offers performers and professionals an unrivaled variety of opportunities, but also requires a never-before-seen investment in skills beyond artistic talent. Today’s artists must build sustainable success in this new arts economy through collaborative big-idea thinking that celebrates a continual engagement in creative process.
Presenting creativity as a process with unlimited applications, The Artist Entrepreneur empowers young artists to step into the new arts landscape and build their own careers. Along the way, the book demystifies essential business skills from self-promotion, branding, touring, and intellectual property exploitation to contracts, revenue sources, and bookkeeping. Addressing students from across the artistic spectrum, this book offers practical exercises to develop individual skills while empowering a new generation of artist entrepreneurs with the promise of a new arts economy.
“This book reveals what living the dream is all about. A lot of work goes into a successful career, and these authors are certainly experts of success. Students and pros alike should really check out what they have to say!”
— Jeff Coffin, saxophonist, Dave Matthews Band; three-time Grammy winner; founder, Ear Up Records; and author, “The Saxophone Book”
Published work
Arts Curriculum for the Actual Arts Economy
Inside Higher Ed
The pandemic has turned the spotlight onto what was an already glaring problem: what we've been teaching our arts students hasn't fully prepared them, argues Eric J. Lapin.
The New Performing-Arts Curriculum
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The fact that enrollments in traditional music, dance, and theater performance degrees have stagnated and job prospects have become dim is undisputed. It’s a simple supply-and-demand problem — with the steady decline of full-time performance-based arts careers, there already are too many students graduating from colleges, universities, and conservatories in performance programs with narrowly focused career paths that cannot be realized.
The Future of Arts Performance in Higher Education
The College Music Society
The job landscape for arts performance graduates has changed dramatically. As a result of a now bleak performance job market, a sea change in higher education arts performance curriculum is needed. Arts performance programs must prepare students with a set of skills beyond traditional performance study.
The Petting Zoo: Fostering Practice-Based Experience in Jazz Appreciation Class
Jazz Education in Research and Practice
This article was written to call attention to the challenges faced when teaching jazz history and concepts to people with little to no jazz background. The introduction brings into focus the interactive methods that are used to teach introductory courses in the various academic disciplines found in contemporary educational plans.
Relocated but not displaced: Bats in the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts
Arts Management Quarterly
In the Spring of both 2018 and 2019 bats moved into the main theater space of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University. The removal of these protected mammals brought significant challenges and disruptions, but also offered many opportunities to test and refine safety procedures, enhance patron communication, and engage with the local community.
Preparing Clemson students for the new arts economy
Expression
In November 2019, Ronald C. McCurdy (University of Southern California), Richard E. Goodstein (Dean Emeritus of the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson) and I published "The Artist Entrepreneur: Finding Success in a New Arts Economy." The book outlines the variety of skills needed for success in today's modern arts landscape. Largely, the music performance curriculum of my undergraduate experience was designed for a musical job market that no longer exists. Full-time careers in symphony orchestras are certainly still possible, but they are few, far between and exceptionally competitive.