The practices of artist‐entrepreneurs located outside Canada's creative hubs viewed through the lens of the pragmatic sociology of critique

Abstract

Artists‐entrepreneurs struggle with the tension between their artistic and entrepreneurial values. Previous research on this tension focuses on urban creative hubs and shows the presence of politicians to create, with the artists, a structure constituted of investment formulas to ease this tension. Based on Boltanski and Thévenot's On Justification theory, our research focuses on the case of artist‐entrepreneurs located outside Canada's creative hubs. The tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values is expressed as a tension between the inspired and market worlds, which is managed through the civic world in Canadian creative hubs. The results of 50 semi‐structured interviews with non‐urban Canadian artist‐entrepreneurs reveal that politicians are less implicated in these regional cultural industries. In order to manage the tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values, artists themselves are developing individual and collective investment formulas to create structure in the cultural industries that compensates for the low‐level of involvement by politicians. Thus, we identify that the tension between the inspired and market worlds is managed through the presence of the projective world in the case of Canada's non‐urban artist‐entrepreneurs.