It's just a matter of language

In the creative industries, the business field and the arts sector are more than ever appointed to each other. This is because amongst other reasons, creativity has become an important asset to business companies. This results in collaborations between artists and business companies for creative projects. Although these fields seem to be more integrated, artists and business parties follow different ideas, maintain different systems and values; they each speak different ‘languages’. Collaboration is however, made possible through the mediation of a creative consultant – an intermediary who understands the economic and artistic language and who is able to ‘translate’ the languages so that interaction is possible. I argue that communication is imperfect without the help of a creative consultant. My research topic deals with finding out the language that is spoken by this intermediary and the matters used to connect business with artistic conversations. In the theoretical part, I consider a creative project as a social setting wherein the business and artistic social spheres interact. I discussed how the social spheres of artists, business companies and the creative consultant are constructed and showed how these spheres are related to each other on the art market. In the practical part, I studied the experiences and visions of artists and creative consultants about creative projects and analyzed their narratives. With this information I examined where the differences and similarities lay in their interpretations, investigated how a general understanding about a creative project – based on aesthetic and commercial values – is constructed by the creative consultant.