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The purpose of this paper is to encourage critics and artists to make use of a cybersystemic perspective in their work to improve its potency and long‐term value to humankind and the larger living world. The arts are centrally involved in the competitive propagation of our deep cultural identities and involved also in the marketing needed to ensure our biological identity propagation. We need better ways to formatively evaluate the arts so that requisite life‐enhancing control variety can be universally available. Unfortunately, the arts are not widely enough understood to be the crucial system steering activities that they are, for us to realize the immense visionary guiding benefits they can offer for solving the very serious global problems of the twenty‐first century.

This is a conceptual paper that proposes a methodology to enable critics and artists to make use of a cybersystemic perspective in their work.

Transformative re‐education of artists and critics to develop cybersystemic leveraging of their own work is now possible by deploying via the web: systemic modeling, simulations, and educative dramatic role‐play games together with learning conversations. The essential content in education for human long‐term viability has to do with how complex system steering really works and precisely how the arts play such a central role in it all.

Education which specifically demonstrates how cybersystemic viability principles such as: good closings, balancing loops, requisite variety, requisite heterarchy, and multi‐level learning conversations work can be used by artists and critics to steer human activity better and so can be a big part of the solution to the severe threats that the world is now experiencing.

This chapter begins with a brief journey through the history of art in order to point out art serves both social and psychological functions and how it is tinged by civilizational and historical context by accumulating layers of purposes and sense from the past times and diverse mind frames. Art produced in the first quarter of the twenty-first century has absorbed the late trends of the twentieth century and has traced and reinforced some paths, especially those in connection to economy (art as a valuable market product) and society (art as statement, critical posture and participatory citizenship). The chapter brings together these ideas with examples showing, on one side, the economic connection of art to the market and mass consumption, while other projects, on the other side, include a politicized facet and activism through self and collective curatorship, participatory art and glocalization of its matters of interest, audiences and social impact.

In recent years there has been a welcome growth of interest in learning how artists understand, engage with and respond to aspects of business practice such as marketing. In the case of music it has been suggested that artists are by no means universally motivated by commercial success, and in many cases find the practices of mass marketing repellent. However, there is general agreement that the study of attitudes of artists is still in its infancy, not just in terms of identifying the research agenda, but just as pressingly in identifying a range of appropriate methodological tools for understanding the phenomenon. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper describes a study where the focus was narrowed to a single genre (jazz), a single country (Poland) and a single artistic level (acts which have been successful both commercially and artistically). In total three biographical interviews were completed, involving four jazz musicians.

The research found many points of convergence with earlier studies, in particular the primacy of the artistic ideal over commercial imperatives. The evidence of this study, though, suggests that jazz musicians can engage with markets through a variety of different methods, which are heavily influenced by their desired and actual artistic identities.

This study sought to make a contribution to a growing area of research into musicians' identities outside the USA.