Who Pays for the Arts?

When the US institutionalized its cultural power in the form of museums, graduate programs, arts councils, and awards after World War II, more artists were able to make a living from their work via grants, residencies, affiliations, and academic positions. While this model was certainly a departure from the persona of the “starving artist,” it stil... See more

Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving o

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Imagination across many fields, such as film or the visual arts, rests on an ecosystem of funding—some philanthropic, some public and some commercial. We need an equivalent for the social field. The freest money in our society is philanthropic, the result of past or present extreme wealth. It has little accountability and no one to answer to, and s

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The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats supp... See more

We really ought to help them out. We all ought to buy more albums on Bandcamp or subscribe to worthy Substackers or whatever. But I have a hunch that those people are going to succeed no matter what.

The real question is whether those huge dinosaurs—major record labels or movie studios or non-profits—start working in the same direction. If they star

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We’re so familiar with this polarization, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is: a cultural and commercial failing. Ideally artists should absorb the best qualities of business and vice versa. Rather than seeing such qualities as opposed to what they stand for as artists or business people, they shou

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