Elliot McGucken
Visiting Professor: Pepperdine University 2006
Posted 9.1.2006
Elliot launched the ArtsEntrepreneurship.com program at UNC
Chapel Hill and he is bringing it to Pepperdine
University this fall. He received a B.A. in physics
from Princeton and a Ph.D. in physics from UNC Chapel
Hill where his dissertation on an artificial retina
for the blind received several NSF grants and a
Merrill Lynch Innovations Award. The
retina-chip research appeared in publications
including Popular Science and Business Week, and the project
continues to this day.
He founded jollyroger.com in 1995, and now runs
over 30 sites. The New York Times deemed
jollyroger.com "simply unprecedented," adding that the
site "teems with discussion, the kind that goes well
beyond freshman lit 101."
Elliot presented Authena Open Source DRM/CMS at the
Harvard Law School OSCOM, and 22surf was accepted to the Zurich
OSCOM. Both Authena and 22surf are aimed at helping
indie artists/creators. He has published four books
including two novels and a poetry collection, and
blogs on Artistic Entrepreneurship for the Kauffman
Foundation.
Your Spring 2006 course, The 45 Revolver: Artistic
Entrepreneurship & Technology 101, is somewhat
iconoclastic when compared to other Arts Entrepreneurship
courses across the country. Can you briefly describe the
class, your course philosophy and the design
process.
The students don't think it's iconoclastic. AE&T is the
opposite of iconoclastic, as Artistic Entrepreneurship
& Technology adheres to the wisdom of the classics. In
preparing the course I have been greatly humbled by all the
infinite wisdom and classical art that has come before, and
I try to communicate this humility to the students. Dante
understood eternity. Homer understood "built to last." The
Founding Fathers penned the Constitution--the fundamental
business document of all modern business--without a law
degree between them--instead they had read the classics.
And so it is that the students can make the greatest
investment of their time in college by learning the eternal
principles that will guide them in all future endeavors.
The class is based on Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey
which Campbell based upon commonalities he perceived in
myths spanning all cultures. There are few texts more
diverse than Campbell's and yet few more unified.
So often we're told that a liberal arts education is
fundamentally useless, but AE&T is based on the premise
that nothing has greater value than learning the eternal
principles--the very same eternal principles Buffett,
Bogle, Dante, Jefferson, Dickinson, Franklin, Campbell, and
all successful artists and entrepreneurs use. In his book
Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, Bogle, a life-long Wall
Streeter quotes not the Wall Street Journal, but
Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Jefferson, Emerson, and Gibbon.
On the first page he quotes Joseph Campbell! The principles
of a liberal arts education are needed more than ever for
renaissances in Hollywood and Wall Street alike.
John Bogle, a classic entrepreneur who founded Vanguard
based on the youthful idealism of his senior thesis at
Princeton recently wrote a great book called, "The Battle
for The Soul of Capitalism." This, along with Homer's
Odyssey, is a required book in AE&T.
On the first page Bogle writes,
My generation has left America with much to set right; you
have the opportunity of a lifetime to fix what has been
broken. Hold high your idealism and your values. Remember
always that even one person can make a difference. And do
your part "To begin the world anew."
That's a great message to every student--to "hold high
their idealism and values."
How much of your syllabus is dedicated to
traditional business concepts and what concepts do you
address?
The syllabus focuses on both the classics and the cutting
edge, both the fundamental theory and the best way to
leverage it in the digital age.
For instance, the Constitution states that one gets to own
what one creates. I show the students this simple clause,
and then we're off to sites such as uspto.gov and
bizfilings.com and nolo.com where they can see the forms
they need to fill out to protect their copyrights,
trademarks, and patents, and where they can incorporate.
All this takes about ten minutes. I tell them that I am no
lawyer nor MBA, but then neither was Jefferson, Madison,
Hamilton, Scorates, Branson, Jobs, nor Gates, nor any of
the poets. I advise them to procede with caution in all
they do--seek out the advice MBAs and lawyers, but first
and foremost, read and understand the contracts themselves!
Just as the teaching of ethics should never be separate
from the teaching of business, the teaching of business is
never separate from the teaching of the classics. The exact
same rugged morality, wile, and independence by which
Odysseus makes it home, forgoing short-term temptations
such as the Sirens and the Lotus Easter, is the same
morality by which businesses must be lead.
AE&T seeks to teach aesthetics to MBAs as much as it
seeks to teach the fundamentals of business to MFAs.
I see you also teach some aspects of law in your
course. How do arts students react when the classroom
discussion turns in that direction?
Law comes from classical myths. The aim of the class is to
teach the spirit of the law--the eternal part of the law,
which the students can take with them the rest of their
lives.
When Mark Twain addressed congress in 1906, he said, "I am
aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is
required by the Constitution of the United States, which
sets aside the earlier Constitution, which we call the
decalogue. The decalogue says you shall not take away from
any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to use the
harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shalt
not steal," but I am trying to use more polite language."
As usual, the authors, artists, and poets cut straight to
the everlasting essence.
What did you learn by teaching the class? What
would you improve?
The class was a vast educational experience! Towards the
end, I realized it would have been fun to create a wiki
devoted to entrepreneurship, and so I will be doing that
for the next class. Please look for wikienterpreneur.org
this fall!
My greatest challenge throughout all this is to extract as
many of the eternal principles that arise in the classroom,
and render them in books, blogs, and websites. The larger
goal of AE&T is to provide lasting
resources/handbooks/tutorials for AE&T.
Your class was virtually overrun with student
interest. What contributed to the success of your
effort?
Students naturally love two things--the classics and the
cutting edge. And that's what AE&T is--an intersection
of the two. With 10 students from music and art, and others
from computer science, communications, business and law,
it's an idea whose time has come
Every student dreams of making their passion their
profession, and the great thing about this country is that
with some talent, luck, and a lot of hard work, this is
possible. They read about the disappearing pensions and
corporate scandals, and they think, "perhaps the best
investment I can make is in my dreams."
Will you be teaching the class again in the fall of
2007?
Yes! I am teaching two sections of AE&T right now at
Pepperdine--an upper-level class and a freshman seminar. In
the Spring of 2007 I am scheduled to teach AE&T and
co-teach a class on DRM in the law school at Pepperdine. I
have signed up to teach AE&T in Summer 2007, and will
be teaching it again all next year. And in spring 2007
we'll be hosting an AE&T conference, inviting students
and faculty to come out and discuss the best ways to make
ones passions one's profession.
The classroom is where the rubber hits the road--it's by
serving the students in a live setting that one finds the
right words to reach them. It's where it all comes to life.
What textbooks and readings did you use for the
class?
I pulled books from both the classical realm and the
cutting edge:
Art
Aristotle. "Poetics"
Michael Tierno. "Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters"
Skip Press. "The Ultimate Writer’s Guide to Hollywood"
Joseph Campbell. "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"
Jonathan Eldredge. "The Sacred Romance"
Robert McKee. "Story"
Kate Wright. "Screenwriting is Storytelling"
The Writer's Journey, Second Edition : Mythic
Christopher Vogler. "Structure for Writers"
Law
The United States Constitution
Bill Pressman. "Patent it Yourself" (nolo.com)
Larry Lessig. "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity"
(Nolo.com)
Business/Entrepreneurship
John Bogle, "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism"
Napoleon Hill. "Think and Grow Rich"
Bill Miller. "The Warren Buffett Way"
Guy Kawasaki. "The Art of the Start"
Edward Jay Epstein. "The Big Picture : The New Logic of
Money and Power in Hollywood"
Garrett Sutton, Robert T. Kiyosaki, Ann Blackman. "Own Your
Own Corporation"
Classics
Harold Bloom. "The Western Canon"
Shakespeare
Dante. "The Inferno"
Homer. "The Odyssey"
The Bible
Biography
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
Richard Branson. "Losing My Virginity : How I've Survived,
Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way"
Jeffrey S. Young, William L. Simon. "iCon: Steve Jobs : The
Greatest Second Act in the History of Business"
Technology
Slashdot.org
Web Resources
artsbusinesstech.com/forum
artsentrepreneurship.com
nolo.com, uspto.gov, slashdot.org, gamasutra.com,
variety.com
How do you conceive or envision "entrepreneurship"
and it's context in Arts education?
Entrepreneurship was perhaps best defined by Shakespeare in
a Midsummer Night's Dream:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Entrepreneurship is about giving "an airy nothing a local
habitation and a name."
Artists naturally do this, and with a bit of wisdom
regarding the law and business, they too can make their
passions their professions. They can incorporate and
protect their IP. The act of original creation is the hard
part--the poet's vision is where the everlasting value
lies.
And when one realizes that our laws originate within Story
and Myth, and that all our business principles are based on
such classical laws, one sees that artists, prophets, and
poets--those who conceived of the fundamental framework of
freedom--were the original entrepreneurs.
At the end of the day, I want to help artists everywhere
make their passions their professions.
I hope AE&T can help!
You can respond directly to Elliot McGucken.
