Entrepreneurial aesthetics

This paper examines the aesthetic dimension of innovative entrepreneurship. It treats markets as aesthetic systems that involve the creation, interpretation and evaluation of aesthetic objects. Entrepreneurs’ visions orient their actions towards purposes (imagined ends) that can have a significant aesthetic character. Innovative entrepreneurs and co-creative consumers combine different elements into new kinds of objects that afford new kinds of aesthetic experiences. Within market systems, brands emerge as aesthetic objects par excellence. Their increasing presence in our everyday lives makes them a significant source of lived aesthetic experience. A case study is provided of Harry Gordon Selfridge, a pioneer of entrepreneurial aesthetics. The paper adopts a broad definition of aesthetics drawn from the philosophy of the aesthetics of everyday life. Accordingly, economic agents can be open to a wide range of aesthetic experiences that are characterized by different modes of attention. The paper distinguishes between contemplative, pragmatic, catallactic and ecological kinds (or modes) of aesthetic experience.