**1. Introduction**

Art for art's sake [1] has long been an imperative difficult to demolish. The goal of the artist, in the purest sense of the term, has always been considered the expression of his own artistic talent. Indeed, often artists seemed worried that addressing business-related issues could

<sup>1</sup> An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 5th CIM Community Meeting, Enschede, NL, September 1–2, 2015.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

undermine the artistic value of what they created. Even scholars mostly neglected entrepreneurial aspects related to arts, with few exceptions (e.g., [2]). Over the last 20 years, something has changed: there has been an increasing interest in entrepreneurship in the arts. The main reason behind this seems to be the progressive reduction of public contributions to cultural enterprises in many countries such as Italy. This highlighted the need to operate according to entrepreneurial logic and to look for alternative sources of funding. Scholars with different backgrounds became interested in these themes, contributing to the formation of a quite heterogeneous emerging literature on entrepreneurship in the arts. This growing attention is also witnessed by some new academic journals dedicated to entrepreneurship in the arts, and specifically: "Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts" and "Journal of Arts Entrepreneurship Research." In addition, Scherdin and Zander published a pioneering book in 2011: "Art Entrepreneurship." The aim of this chapter is to clarify the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in the arts through a review of the literature of the last decades. In this way, we will identify the dominant issues addressed by scholars and we will trace the future evolution of the studies.

industries (e.g., [14–20]), examining artistic issues. Many papers examine the phenomenon within the "core creative arts" [11] (e.g., [10, 21–24]), while others focus on narrower competitive areas within the arts (e.g., [25, 26]) or are limited to specific arts (e.g., [27–30]).

Based on these observations, the chapter reviews arts entrepreneurship literature, trying to

In order to review the literature on arts entrepreneurship, we followed a rigorous methodological approach, starting with the definition of precise selection criteria to identify the

The first decision concerned the type of scientific contributions to consider. In this regard, we decided to focus only on articles, thus excluding books, book chapters, review of books, and papers presented at conferences. This is for two reasons: (1) to try to make the set of contributions to examine the most homogeneous as possible and (2) to avoid problems in defining the selection field (e.g., with reference to conference papers, which selection criteria should be

The second decision concerned the journals to which make reference. We preliminarily considered top entrepreneurship and management journals, searching for the following expressions in the title, in the abstract, and in the keywords of the articles: "arts entrepreneurship," "art entrepreneurship," "art entrepreneur," "arts entrepreneur," "artist entrepreneur," "cultural entrepreneur," and "cultural entrepreneurship." Given the limited number of articles identified, we realized that the argument has not yet found enough room to justify such a focused analysis of the literature. Therefore, we decided to cover a broad spectrum of journals as outlined below. First, we considered the journals included in the Scopus database and, given the transversality of the theme, we selected the following thematic areas: "social sciences," "arts and humanities," "business, management and accounting," "decision sciences," and "economics, econometrics and finance." We searched for the same expressions mentioned above, but in the whole text of the articles and with reference to the period 1992–2016. This research has provided us with a significant number of articles, constituting our starting point. We made a first selection by considering articles published in journals

), updated to 2016. In this way, we have been able to identify and exclude articles not

The AIDEA (Italian Academy of Business Administration and Management) list includes journals of management, business administration, business organization and corporate finance, ranking them into four quality bands. GEV lists are arranged by groups of experts appointed by the National Agency for Evaluation of the Italian System of University and

We also considered some journals included in the "economics" section of the list, and namely: "Review of Austrian Economics," "Journal of Cultural Economics," and "International Journal of Cultural Policy." We also considered two journals that are not included in AIDEA and GEV lists, due to the relevance of the articles identified with respect to the theme under investigation: "Journal of Business Venturing Insights," and "Arts and Humanities in Higher Education."

(for the latter, only administration and manage-

Arts and Entrepreneurship: Disentangling the Literature http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72014 13

resources to examine and culminating in a qualitative analysis of them.

trace its future evolution.

adopted to select the conferences?).

included in the AIDEA and/or GEV lists2

ment3

Research (ANVUR).

2

3

**3. Methodology**
