Artist Communities

Artists are creative producers working in a variety of cultural industries, including visual art, music, literature, theater, film, and comedy. Few artists work in isolation. Artists have social ties not only with distributors and audiences but also with other artists. When artists share symbolic and material resources through enduring social ties, they form a community with varying degrees of self-identification and identification by others. Artist communities may include other actors in the cultural industry who interact with the members, but the community principally revolves around social and artistic relationships among artists. These communities can be geographically localized or dispersed, short-lived or lasting, porous or bounded in membership, and composed of weak or strong social ties.