Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA

The title compares <i>all</i> the money given out by Kickstarter (including non-art projects) to NEA's budget, which <i>as of now</i> is not a fair comparison. However, I think this is a technicality, since at the rate KS is growing, the comparison will be valid very soon.<p>The second apples and oranges point is stronger though: Look at the types of projects that NEA funds, e.g. translation projects in 2011 (<a href="http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/LitTranslation.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/LitTranslation.htm...</a>): although the grants are tiny (~$10K) I don't think these are types of things that would have shined in the KS environment. So NEA is doing this as a public service, funding people who wouldn't have been funded otherwise. This is important. I remember Tarkovsky's lamenting the fact that his film <i>The Mirror</i> was not understood by the people so he had difficulty getting his other projects funded by Goskino (from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky#Film_career_in_the_Soviet_Union" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky#Film_career_in...</a>: "From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature.") <i>That's</i> why the state has to be in the business of funding arts, to protect artists from the "tyranny of mass taste" (unfortunately, in Russia this worked backwards).<p>Now, after having said all that, let us once again emphasize the fresh approach KS brought to arts funding. I bet if/when they thought about KS before, the NEA people (most likely they haven't heard about KS, as these are not exactly cutting edge Internet technology people) they chuckled about the naivete of its approach, thinking it a fad (forget about NEA, I thought like this myself!). After millions of dollars of arts funding, they'll probably take the crowd sourcing approach more seriously. Patron-based art funding is hundreds of years old, the difference here is the number of patrons backing each project.

What does this do to the whole "but art will cease to exist if artists can't have absurd monopoly rights over copyrighted material" argument, which the MAFIAA seem to love so much?<p>If people are willing to fund arts regardless of legal obligation. Then the number one pillar sustaining the copyright "morals" gets easily destroyed. Crowdfunding demonstrates that if we completely remove copyright laws: art will survive.

Just my opinion, but the state should have never been in the business of supporting the arts. Let those who want to support the arts do so privately. Kickstarter proves that good projects can get private funding directly. I love to see this kind of organic privatization.

Fun fact, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is the largest cultural funding agency in the nation, with an expense budget in Fiscal Year 2012 of $152 million, larger than NEA.

Does anyone really consider the NEA a significant source of funding? The vast majority of "artists" produce things that people happily pay money for, and the notion of subsidy is unnecessary.<p>The idea that what the NEA funds is "real art" and the associated disdain for commercially viable art is in my opinion fairly perverse.

The headline is misleading. Kickstarter expects to provide more funding overall than the NEA, but not all of Kickstarter is arts projects.