The community-wide mindset in Memphis must become focused on this: our city can once again become an arts&culture&entertainment hub — that is or should be our city’s niche. Government has to quit thinking our saviors must be lured from outside the city. Govt. incentives and VC or even govt seed funds must be aimed locally at the artistic/entrepreneurial community who are already trying to make grassroots things happen but who have no support. Workshops must be held bringing the entrepreneurially-minded together with the artists and creatives, then let nature takes its course. Local start-up incubators must be more realistic about our prospects as a city — so rather than tech, it’s arts. The next google is probably not going to come out of Memphis largely b/c we don’t have an MIT or Stanford in our backyard. Instead we have a lot of indie artists and creatives. I’m hoping to help address this with my project Memphis Art Park, whose campaign I’m about to officially launch:
http://memphisartpark.org/
Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Memphis-Art-Park/287547549652?ref=ts

How do you cultivate Arts & Entertainment as an industry?”
Don’t ignore it.
I could stop there and hope I don’t regret that I didn’t. The Arts and Entertainment industry is probably the best it’s been in Memphis in many ways. But as usual developing more, rewarding now, and sustaining for the future has always been the riddle to solve. I’m not going to speak about current success stories. We all know about them.

The few and far between moments of artistic genius that Memphis has birthed had short careers. While the rest of the world, and a few local leaders, cultivated the artists’ careers, the City of Memphis didn’t build on it successfully. Maybe the powers-that-be didn’t know how or didn’t see the ROI. That’s the past.

You have to cultivate an environment for successful artistic entrepreneurship.

Education
Do all of our schools reflect how the community values arts education? Are the teachers supported generously? Do the schools foster risk-taking and original thinking? Are the students given survival skills?

Business
How many artists/producers sit on chamber of commerce boards?
How about tax credits? Do we remove stumbling blocks for the artist to help them find their audience? Is the business community mining the literary, performing and visual/media arts communities effectively? How many physicians, insurance companies, and grocery stores would barter goods and services with an artist?

Politics
Do you hear our politicians talk about the value of our great artistic culture and their plans to integrate the thinking and talents of our artists in their plans for the City? How many working artists are called on to be on city planning committees?

Society
How many working artists sit on Boards of non-profit and service organizations? How many working artists sit on the boards of cultural institutions? Do you hire DJs for a birthday party or a live, local band?
Do you have season tickets to at least one cultural organization? Remember, live theatre is just like a baseball game. Costumes, a stage, heros and bad guys, and lots of anticipation. Can you buy some original art and not a poster?

If the citizens of Memphis demand more and better from their arts and cultural community and are willing to support, reward, and integrate the artists to build on that creative capital, the sky is the limit.

How do you cultivate Arts & Entertainment as an industry? I struggle with this. In music, Nashville has a lock-down on country but pop/rock music has moved centers from Memphis to LA to Seattle to home studios. Every state is offering incentive packages to movie companies but few areas are actually building any capacity… it seems that they are having one-off productions and then lots of down time. And, most of my most artistic and creative freinds are terribly hard to coral from a business-enterprise standpoint… it is tough to quantify how many people they really touch or support.

Just a question. I believe that the Arts & Entertainment are critical as an almost intangible support for everything else. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has thoughts on how to make it more entrepreneurial or grow into something resembling an industry sector or is it wrong to push it that way?

Five questions that eventually need to be answered when building a relationship with a business…
How can I help you? How can you help me? Who else do you do business with? Where are they? How do we help them help us?

Sounds elementary (because it is), but it is amazing where some of these conversations lead. Glad both you and the Mayor are thinking about it.