Entrepreneur, Iværksætter, Unternehmer

Three artists were asked by the daily of south Sweden, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, to write about their lives as entrepreneurs.

Ida Börjel is a Swedish poet. She reflects on the word ”entrepreneur”, looks in the Encyclopaedia and searches for combinations of Entrepreneur + Art on Internet and gets 176.000 hits. She learns that the word in origin, is a military war term used in the Middle Ages. Doesn’t feel very relevant went you work as an Artist. She finds the German word ”Unternehmer” and Danish word ”Iværksætter” better to use.

Birgitta Westling is a Visual Artist and when she writes about her life as an entrepreneur she starts with: ”When I hear the word entrepreneur, I unsafe my revolver”. She gives two reasons. Firstly almost all Artists are already in practice entrepreneurs. It’s always the Artist, who on her own runs around to find money to pay for the Art. Secondly, the word is from another world, or field, like economy, marketing or funerals and undertakers. Why would this suddenly be relevant for an Artist?

Anders Carlsson is Artistic Director of Institutet (The Institute) in Malmö. His main concern is the one that culture, when discussed at present, only seem to concern the way it’s useful for other things. Entrepreneurship is either expected to generate new products and markets within creative industries, or it’s useful for education, integration or pedagogies. For him Art is a space in society where those things that otherwise don’t fit in have a place guaranteed. Art rather stays with the problem, than try to solve it.

Read an interview of Ida Börjel here. Read a little bit more of Anders Carlsson here. Unfortunately all the links are in Swedish.