THE ART OF START UP / ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – SPRING 2026

Programme for 5th and 6th year students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

Artistic Practice as Profession

The Art of Start Up is a course focused on personal entrepreneurship and on establishing and running an artistic profession.

When you graduate from an arts education, there is a strong likelihood that your professional life will be as self-employed: you will run your own business — either independently or in collaboration with others. How that business is structured, and how your personal entrepreneurship unfolds, depends on you.

What motivates you as an artist? What are your core interests? What ambitions do you have for your artistic profession? These are some of the questions we will work with throughout the course, leading, among other things, to the development of your artist statement and the choice of your business structure.

As a professional artist establishing your own practice, you will also encounter a range of legal and administrative requirements. There are regulations concerning business registration (CVR), taxation, VAT, and bookkeeping — all of which we will address in the course, ensuring that you acquire the knowledge needed to make informed decisions and to run your enterprise on a solid and transparent foundation.

Often, enterprises that are not firmly rooted in artistic practice struggle to develop into sustainable and well-functioning professional frameworks. At the same time, many artists find it challenging to think of their artistic work as a coherent whole — something that must function both as artistic practice and as an artistic business.

The Art of Start Up is about making that integration work for you.