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Who Pays for the Arts?

In the U.S., the arts are subsidized by the very wealthy and the very poor. But amid ongoing turmoil in the nonprofit world, some people are trying to build a new creative economy.

So in 1986, when he became the leader of his family’s foundation, he expanded its focus from visual art to include grants, awards, fellowships, an event series, and a residency program for the literary world, particularly nonprofit presses and the writers published with them. “I think that’s why it’s very hard to align it with this similar kind of support in other arts, where you really can look and see how many people went to see that opera or that dance performance.” Instead, she added, “there’s something sort of mysterious and beautiful and private about a reader’s engagement with the written word, and that is part of its power, but that’s also why it makes it a more difficult story to tell and bring other funders in.” “Rather than working in a solitary fashion and blindly superimposing layers of potentially redundant programming, we should look to take into account the artistic, economic, and cultural environment of which we are part and upon which we depend, guided by logics of attention, distribution, and the sharing of resources,” Désanges writes.

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