A few folks have e-mailed asking why I didn’t call it an “Artist Entrepreneur”.
Two reasons:
1.) “Entrepreneur” as a concept is bandied about a little too easily, and almost becomes lost in the business-speak of Americana. Besides, an entrepreneur thinks creatively, acts with planned impulse, moves quickly, and is on many levels a risk-taker. But a lot of these attributes are shared by an artistic temperament. What I was looking for was an opposing concept.
2.) “Bureaucrat” is a much-maligned word, but better fits what I was trying to convey. The artist I was trying to describe can not just be a pie-in-the-sky, I-don’t-want-to-think-about-numbers, fax-it-in-to-the-corporation-and-let-them-deal-with-it kind of person. Counter-balancing their artistic side, they have to be like a bureaucrat: a worker of fixed routines; a planner of repeated, steady actions. In essence, a steady worker-bee.