03/19/2012

Artists Find Benefactors in Web Crowd

"In the last year alone, money troubles have pushed the New Mexico Symphony to close, New York City Opera to slash its budget by two-thirds and the State of Kansas to eliminate all public financing for the arts.

As formerly reliable employers and patrons struggle to pay their own bills, artists have been forced to intensify their hunt for new fund-raising strategies. Even fictional artists have been affected. On the new NBC series Smash, the Broadway producer Eileen Rand (Anjelica Huston) tries to sell her beloved Degas just to finance a workshop.

Which is why the prospect of financial crowd-sourcing on the internet has been enthusiastically embraced by some as an important new model for the future of arts financing.

The question is, how important?

Kickstarter, a Brooklyn company that serves as a conduit for artists, industrial designers and others to solicit donations, recently boasted that it expected to raise $150 million in contributions in 2012. By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts, noted Yancey Strickler, one of Kickstarter’s founders, has a budget of $146 million.

Online financial crowd-sourcing of artists still represents only a smidgen of the more than $8 billion that private individuals donate to the arts each year. Nonetheless, the speedy proliferation of such Web sites has attracted notice.

'Everybody right now is looking for ways to exploit technology to maximize and customize the ways people engage with the arts,' said Sunil Iyengar, research director at the National Endowment for the Arts. Recently United States Artists in Los Angeles, a nonprofit that supports American artists, began USA Projects, and New York Foundation for the Arts started Artspire, two nonprofit variations of online crowd-funding devoted solely to artists or fledgling cultural groups."

The New York Times 03/16/2012