Artistes & Entreprises

Coming from plenty of different countries and backgrounds, artists, critics, art historians, economists and philosophers are addressing the issue of artist firms. Combining firms and artistic patterns, they have been emerging from all over the world since the 1960s as "companies" or "firms" and are made by business artists. 
This publishing aims to confront critical approaches under the shape of questioning and the appropriation by artists of the model of the company: name, status, labelling, graphic image, sound mode operating, marketing or production. Everything seems to converge towards what could be seen as a revival of the artistic critique through these new ways of creation, to a fundamental reconsideration of the place that the artist intends to have in society. 
Why and how have they invested this field apparently out from artistic interrogations? The emergence of these "firms" often called “critical companies" is to be related to the evolution of the global society, entrepreneur artists want to provide their own answer by taking over the codes of the business world, by even parodying sometimes the business strategies, inventing new forms of empowerment against current models in the market and art circles.
Aren't we running a risk of contamination? What differs them from a real company? The entrepreneur artist seems to assume an ever emerging leadership. It is by asking questions related to the value and the economical, social and political position and examining the detailed inventory (that the line of research Art&Flux has conducted for four years), that the different actors of this publishing will be attempting to identify what these artist's firm are made of.