ART project invites you to the webinar, that takes place 16 September 2025, from 13.30-16.00 CET, in Zoom. Today artists are expected to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and become entrepreneurs:self-employed freelancers in the cultural labor market. This could put a pressure on artists to commercialize their creative works to secure their economic survival. But many artists are not driven by a market logic, they do not want to start and grow businesses, neither do they seek to contribute to general economic growth. Framing artists as entrepreneurs is also expecting them to have a wide range of skills beyond their artistic abilities, such as marketing, networking, and business management. While this may give them opportunities to have agency over work life. It can also, put a pressure to develop these skills and challenge artists’ autonomy and their opportunities to concentrate on their artistic expressions.
The research project ArtR ( ArtR ) invites you to take part in a webinar where we want to highlight ideas, tensions, challenges and strategies for artists to have a sustainable working life as free artists or as cultural entrepreneurs. We invite researchers, decision-makers, politicians, artists and students to take part in discussions from different perspectives on the above topics.
The webinar will start with three short introductory keynotes on the topics: artistic freedom, cultural entrepreneurship and artistic work and will continue with discussions in breakout rooms with a summary in the end.
Time: 16 September 2025 from 13:30- 16:00 CET
Place: Online (Zoom)
Keynote presentations
1. Freedom of art in the neoliberalized welfare state, Kaisa Murtoniemi, PhD, Tampere
University
2. Which space for the arts? Artists between public and private in society, Katja Lindqvist,
Associate Professor, Lund university
3. Sustaining Non-Urban Creative Communities: A Place-Based Approach to Innovation, Silvia
Silva and Paola di Nunzio, Coimbra University, INSITU project (Horizon EU)
4. Artistic work and organizing, Monika Kostera, Professor, Warsaw University, Södertörn
University
Register: here for a link for the Webinar. No later than the 11 th of September.
If you have questions about the webinar, please contact: ann.sofie.koping@sh.se, Södertörn University.