Art & Design Careers

The professional paths of artists rarely follow a classical pattern. Changes in creation (e.g. due to digitalisation or globalisation), in connection with economic, cultural, political, social and scientific dimensions, means that art and design careers are sometimes even more dynamic. The following publications provide various examples of our research results. 

Frédéric Martel, Hartmut Wickert (Eds.), "Embedded Artists" (2020) 

Artistic works, processes and methods often do not take place in contexts that are classical artistic terrain. What are the consequences — not only for artists but also for their environment? What does “management through art” or “artistic management” mean? Which “artistic” competences and skills are used and needed in the “non-artistic” world? And what does this mean for understanding the role of artists? This documentation emerged from the “Embedded Artist Conference,” which took place in November 2018 at Zurich University of the Arts and explored these questions.

Non-paper for the German Competence Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries

As an official research partner of the KKKW (Competence Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries of the Federal Government), the CreativeEconomies Research Venture has produced a three-part series of non-papers for 2018 and 2019. These non-papers are dedicated to the current state of research on important phenomena, developments and controversies related to the creative economies. The focus lies on the global debate. The translation and interpretation of these non-papers for the German-speaking countries was realised in cooperation with the NPP and in close collaboration with numerous creative economy actors and other partners.

Non-Paper I: “Value Creation: Creative Economies Perspective”
Non Paper II: “Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Creative Economies” / Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Creative Economies: XII Observations / 12 Oberservations
Non-Paper III: “Narrative Strategies for the Creative Economies”

Simon Grand, Christoph Weckerle, "What if? The Creative Economies as a central research field of the future" (2017)

This essay by Simon Grand and Christoph Weckerle was published in PHASE XI, a 2017 publication of the Competence Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries of the Federal Government (Germany).

Simon Grand, Christoph Weckerle, "The Palaver on Scaling Enterprises" (2017) 

The 21st century is characterised by our almost limitless ability to imagine things on different scales. Our imagination on the subject of “size” has driven technical progress and has also inspired art. The proceedings of the symposium on “Too Big To Scale” (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2017), held at Zurich University of the Arts in 2015, include Simon Grand and Christoph Weckerle’s “A Palaver on Scaling Creative Enterprises.”

Frédéric Martel, "The cultural critic is dead! Long live Smart Curation!" (2015)

Does the future of cultural criticism lie in the hands of “machines”? Is this future generated by the recommendation algorithms of Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, etc.? No, what is required is the combination of algorithms with human judgment. This line of thought was discussed in a research initiative titled “Smart Curation” based at Zurich University of the Arts.