Friend or foe? – Arts and business in partnership

It has become an erroneous but commonly held belief that the values and practices of ‘arts’ and ‘business’ are incompatible. An entrepreneur such as Sir Richard Branson surely knows there is a correlation between his commercial success and his willingness to embrace creativity and risk-taking, and who would have known about The Beatles’ creative expression were it not for Brian Epstein’s business acumen? A new breed of management consultant has emerged to liaise between arts and business, to facilitate a ‘new’ era of co-operation and appreciation between arts and business and undoubtedly to profit from their inability to figure this relationship out for themselves.