“I think there’s an increasingly broadening definition of what it means to be a cultural creative practitioner,” said Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, which last year initiated its own version of a start-up incubator for artists called New Inc. In a space with whiteboards for walls, they learn career development skills and commune with technologists and designers. “Artists are much more aware now, and empowered,” especially when it comes to the commercial value of their work, Ms. Phillips said, adding: “Their ideas are often copied in the commercial realm. So why shouldn’t they get the credit and profit from it themselves?”

Adam Harvey, 33, is a Brooklyn-based artist and New Inc member. His work includes wearable countersurveillance technology — an “antidrone hoodie,” for example, woven with metallic fabric that is intended to thwart the thermal cameras that drones carry from capturing your image. In 2013 he exhibited a version of the hoodie at a New Museum pop-up. Now he sells his pieces online at his own Privacy Gift Shop; his most popular item is the OFF Pocket, a cellphone case that functions as a Faraday cage, blocking incoming and outgoing transmission signals. He said he had sold about 1,000 of them at $80 apiece after financing the project through Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London recently added one to its collection.

“I’m not opposed to galleries or museums, but if the goal of your work is to connect with people and for your ideas to engage other people, to get responses from them, by setting up an e-commerce and allowing people to buy it — they don’t even have to buy it, just to see it for sale — it enters this world of ideas,” Mr. Harvey said. “I love that.”

Mr. Harvey, who freelances as a technology developer to support his art practice, already had most of the skills he needed to build an online store; at New Inc, he is learning the principles of running a business for what he conceives of as his functional art. “I wanted to own the concept and not have it only exist in someone else’s system,” he said.

The work of Martine Syms, a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles who explores identity, race and communication, is exhibited more often than sold; she refers to herself as “a conceptual entrepreneur” who creates “machines for ideas,” a riff on Sol LeWitt’s vision of Conceptual art. “I think of entrepreneurship as a way of creating value,” she said.