Ep. 4: The Big Picture I: What Are The Five Types of Arts Funding and Why Should You Know About Them?
Transcript:
So, let’s say you’ve found your meaning as a performing artist, like we talked about in the last episode, and let’s say you want to undertake – going back to the etymology of the word “entrepreneurial” from episode 2 – a project which puts that meaning into action.
Where do you start?
Like most performers, I didn’t really start thinking about how the arts get funded until I actually started to try – and fail – to fund my own projects after I finished college. Once I did start thinking about it, though, I realised you might be able to divide arts funding into 5 categories by two criteria:
1) who is investing money?
and
2) what do they expect to get in return?
We might name the five types of funding:
- Public
- Private
- Commercial
- Crowdfunding
- Self-funding
And most successful projects combine several of these different types of funding.
What I learned the hard way is that before you undertake any project, you need to know which type of funding is even available to you and how the kind of funding you’ll pursue is going to effect how you conceive of your project.
It’s not a linear process, in other words, going from idea to practical execution – you don’t, at least at first, get to be the mad genius who has full artistic freedom, outside of established institutions. There’s a constant back and forth, action and reaction, between art and how it is produced. I also learned that you may first have to change as an artist before you can become the kind of artist that can produce their own projects – this sometimes can mean that the first step is to go back into the oasis of education, though only if it allows you to truly transform and learn new skills, like I said in episode 2.
So, in this episode I’m going to delve into the 5 ways the arts are funded – but first let me tell you why I think I even have a right to talk about arts funding in the first place – which is my failures.
If one becomes an expert from failing at something, I should be a bit of an expert at arts funding.
It’s hard for me to tell you about my failed project and not feel kind of embarrassed – partially because, when I try to describe the process of getting projects off the ground as truthfully as possible, the description gets really tedious (which is why I tried to simplify things as much as possible in these descriptions), but also because even though I know, objectively, that most independent creative projects end up fizzling out because they don’t get funding, artists don’t exactly brag about these instances publicly and so it feels self-deriding to talk about them myself. But, in the end, that’s precisely why I decided to share my funding failures – because it would have helped me to hear about other artists’ failures (more often and in more depth!) when I was going through my own. Because – failure is kind of the norm.
What I want to make very clear, though, is that what I learned from these attempts is what I – not the system, or other people – did wrong. I want to make that very clear upfront.
So, here are the stories of two failed projects and afterwards I’ll tell you what I think I did wrong and how I changed course afterwards:
If you’re not interested in these personal stories, you can jump to the section where I actually talk about funding models by clicking here.
After finishing my Master’s, I had an inkling that if I wanted to stay mentally engaged by singing music that was fresh and actually interested me, something that was not really the case with the gigs I had, I would have to organise opportunities myself. So, a pianist and I founded a duo with the purpose of singing lesser-known, mostly 20th century, mostly Czech, art songs. Our first project was a lecture-performance around the art songs of Czech composers Vítězslava Kaprálová and Bohuslav Martinů, which also involved telling the story of the interwar era they lived through. Our ambition was to tour the US and the Czech Republic with this concert for the 100th centennial of the founding of Czechoslovakia, which was coming up the following year.
So, I teamed up with a small, fairly new, Czech singer-led opera-theatre company which had recently completed an opera project I really admired and they agreed to let me present my lecture-recital under their auspices. In return they could keep any money leftover from the budget.
Yes, you heard correctly – I believe this was the deal we made, that they could take whatever was leftover from the budget. It was a rather silly deal to make, looking back – I mean, it wasn’t really advantageous to either party so, I’m really not sure what we were thinking.
In any case, the founder of the company did a bunch of paperwork to officially make our project fall under their auspices, so that I could better apply for grants. It was up to me to actually write the grant proposals, raise the money, and arrange the concerts. When nothing came of any grants (more on that later), I turned my attention to Czech Cultural Centres across the US, hoping they would co-produce the tour. But for the “co-“ in “co-produce” to make sense I needed to already have part of the budget covered. So, I crowdfunded some money among friends and family, and approached Czech Centres in the US saying that the pianist and I would pay our own round tickets to the US from the Czech Republic if they covered some of the other costs. However, after much emailing, all of the Czech Centres fell through because even with our tickets to the US paid, the cost of travel within the US, accommodations, rental fees, and honorariums were just too high. In the end we decided that the only way to make contacts in the US was for me to go sing some concerts on my own that season without the duo’s co-founder. The two concerts I ended up doing in the US were not at Czech Centres, however, but at universities – my alma mater and a university near the border of Minnesota and South Dakota which a family friend connected me with. I didn’t pay anything for accommodations, because I stayed with people I knew for both concerts. So, in the end, I just paid for a single round plane trip and the two pianists that ended up accompanying me – it hardly felt like a tour. The concerts generated the typical post-show enthusiasm which, however, fizzled out like yesterday’s champagne once anything concrete was to come of it, so I ultimately didn’t succeed as a delegate for our tour.
Given how small-scale my prospecting tour to the US ended up being, there could have been money left over to give to the company under whose auspices I was working and this could have generated some good will for future projects, like the centennial tour we ultimately wanted to do. But – absurdly – my plane ticket to the US happened to be purchased from a company which went bankrupt not long before the tour. I had to buy a last-minute, expensive ticket and so blasted through my entire budget. I think the founder of the opera company felt they did needless paperwork for something that didn’t end up yielding anything for them and this generated resentment. Though, on the other hand, not making any money shouldn’t have been something totally unexpected even without a bankrupt airline – it’s not like art-song recitals are known to be a great business investment.
The pianist, and later a guitar player and I, did end up performing more modest art song concerts back in the Czech Republic – but then the pandemic hit.
And while on the one hand live performing stopped, on the other hand the internet exploded with live performers sharing what they do, including – and it surprises me how fast this happened – all sorts of concerts, skits, even little movies produced by established music, opera, theatre, and dance companies or, more interestingly, by performers of the “classical” ilk, themselves – opera singers, dancers, Broadway performers, orchestra players.
And pretty early on I started thinking about “the medium is the message”, that quip by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. What were these online pieces of media created around “classical” performing art forms? Was a solo-opera filmed by a singer in their living room actually an opera? Was a video of a concert in which each musician streamed from a different apartment really the same as a jam session? What about living-room ballet? I felt like these performances were basically filmed homages to these live art-forms, rather than having value as either movies or operas, ballets, theatre and concerts in their own right. And I wondered if it would even be possible to produce something which would actually be a good piece of cinema that also uses as its basis formats which are made for live performance rather than the screen.
So – of course – I decided to produce a short film, as one does. The film was to be an homage to both classical singing and cinema while also having value as an example of both. As a basis for the film, I used Sentiment, a contemporary, a capella art-song cycle by Juliana Hall and Caitlin Vincent. In 2020, it really felt like the right moment for this and at the very beginning there seemed to be good momentum.
I worked on the project for about three years and I don’t want to get into all the twists and turns but basically there were two iterations of funding this project: One sought money from the European Erasmus+ fund and the other from an Estonian experimental film fund.
For my first attempt, I approached a grant writer – well, grant advisor, since they didn’t actually write any of the grant. I found out that the way a lot of so-called grant writers do business is that they don’t take any money up front and then get a percentage of the budget, if the grant is successful. That sounds great, right? I mean it’s better than the alternative of taking money up front, I would say. What I wouldn’t have predicted is that it does kind of incentivise grant writers to take on a lot of projects without investing a lot of work into any one of them. I also suspect it incentivises – and I think this was in part my case – the grant writer to encourage clients to develop projects with bigger, more ambitious budgets and apply for bigger grants, even if the grantee is less likely to receive those.
The only grant that really seemed viable, according to the grant writer, though partially just because it was open at the right time (timing, by the way, is a constant headache with grants), was one that would involve totally changing the concept of the project. And so – lo and behold – what started out as a short film, became an educational project for theatre artists to learn about making films. Apparently, my experience was not uncommon – grant advisors are known to start out by being asked to help fund a small-scale gallery show and somehow ending up with a proposal for a series of community centres designed to cure childhood hunger through finger painting – just so they can apply for the bigger and currently-open grant.
But anyway, I proceeded to do all the things the grant writer advised me to do: I found a film production company under whose auspices I could apply; I found a Bulgarian opera education company to collaborate with, since cross-country collaboration was one of the stipulations of the grant; I got the head of the alternative theatre department to write a letter of support for the project; I created and disseminated a questionnaire to theatre artists in both Czech and English, then read through and analysed snarky responses about how theatre artists don’t need film training; I found and cited empirical research to support my claim that theatre artists would benefit from training in filming techniques; I filled out paperwork and obtained signatures from the film production company and the Bulgarian opera education company to officially make them the two organisers of the project; I wrote thousands of words answering questions like: “How will you ensure the effective management of the project and good collaboration between the two partnered organisations during the realisation of the project?” Okay, let’s pause on that – if you just let this question wash over you it may seem to make sense but just imagine, for a second, trying to answer it. How can you even begin answering such a question honestly? You might try something like: “I will communicate regularly with both organisations, while staying open to any concerns they may have throughout the project. We will conduct regular Zoom calls to touch base about our progress…” etc. etc. It’s a bullshit question requiring a bullshit answer.
Anyway, I spent two months writing this grant proposal and communicating with collaborators and potential students and getting documentation – and then, a few weeks before the deadline, the film producer, who had agreed, early on, to have his production company be one of the two participating organisations, blocked me from handing the grant proposal in, saying that he was worried about “the financial health of his company” and basically how getting that money into the production company’s account would effect his ability to ask for other grants. Strange. Shouldn’t he have thought of that before he agreed to participate in the project? At this point, I was very, very angry because, whether the reason the producer gave was true or not, he should not have waited until just before the deadline to raise the issue. His timing led me to believe this producer had only agreed to the project because he didn’t think I was going to get the money and when he started to realise I might actually succeed in getting the grant, he backed out because he had never actually intended to work on this project in the first place.
So, at that point I felt like I was done and I don’t know how long it took for me to give it another shot, or, frankly, why I even decided to. I guess I’m just very hard-headed. But, at some point, I was connected with a young Estonian director who seemed like she really wanted this project in her portfolio and seemed to have the training and the team – including a producer – to do it with. At that point, I was kind of able to hand over the project to her and she and her team did most of the work. They re-named the film, modified the script I had written, found an Estonian historical theatre to film in, had digital models made of the sets, wrote the grant proposal and calculated the budget. I was asked to look for a co-producer since co-productions seem to do better than single-source projects (funding organisations prefer, and often require, that you also have funding coming from elsewhere, which can feel like a real Catch 22 when you’r starting out). My search for a Czech or American co-producer led to a series of debacles and dead ends that it would be too tedious to get into but, to make a long story short, we didn’t find a co-producer but we did make it to the last 8 projects selected by this Estonian film fund – a fund I can’t find any record of anywhere but I think was in its first year when we applied. The director and producer had to go in front of a committee to defend the project and the interview seemed pretty in-depth. However, even after all this, we were not, in the end, selected for funding. We got a thoughtful letter of critique from the committee, however, which actually aligned with some of my misgivings about our pitch – namely, that it wasn’t actually experimental enough for experimental film funding, though it was also too niche to be able to compete for regular film funding.
Which brings me to what I think I did wrong in both these failed projects.
I think there were basically three problems:
1) neither of the projects fit well into any funding available to me.
2) I didn’t focus on building a team and tried to do everything myself
3) my projects were perhaps too conventional.
Let me explain all three of those:
When it comes to not really fitting into any funding: With the lecture-recitals, I was at first seeking grant money from Czech grant organisations and foundations for whom a tour of the US was something which they thought of as bringing no local benefit because it was happening abroad. There are special funds for international projects like that and I should have done more research on them and accommodated their deadlines and special requirements, if the grant-rout was really what I wanted. And, when the grants failed, I started asking for a lot of travel and accommodations money from Czech Cultural Centres in the US, which generally don’t have a lot of money to begin with and so won’t take risks with young singers who aren’t established. When it comes to presenting the art song recital in the Czech Republic this was, perhaps, as we say in Czech, bringing sticks into a forest. Sure, Czechs are interested in their own culture, but I wasn’t offering anything particularly original in a Czech context. Now, there are festivals and concerts cycles in the Czech Republic which present art songs and lesser-known repertoire and which I could see programming a recital like ours – but festivals don’t seem to be used to producing a finished recital concepts brought to them by a singer they don’t know. Generally speaking, programming for these festivals and concert cycles seems to go through a dramaturg or a festival board that creates a concept and then picks singers for existing projects. Again, our project didn’t fit into this.
In the case of the film the problem was quite similar – it didn’t fit anywhere. It wasn’t experimental enough to be an experimental film and this was made worse by the fact that it was using a pre-existing song-cycle – if the music had been original to the film, it may have been easier to fund, in the end. Interestingly, this is kind of a cultural difference between film and theatre – the theatre world is used to the concept of bringing fresh perspectives to existing works, while this is a bit of a foreign concept to film, outside of remakes. There were other films made by classical singers in those years, and their existence made me believe that there was some kind of, though small, market for an opera film. But what I didn’t realise at the time was that the reason other singers were able to produce short musical films that approached the artistic ambitions of what we were trying to do cinematically was because they were being funded in part by classical-music and opera institutions, that is, from the live entertainment and classical music side, not primarily by film funds. And the reason these singers got funded was because they were seen to have value within the small world of classical music and opera – they had agents, came through prestigious young artist programs, in other words they were well-connected in the opera and classical music world and it was that world, not the film world, that was mostly interested in film projects that involved classical singing and classical music. But the opera and classical music world also doesn’t have that much money to spare on such projects – so only people who are high in status within that world could ever hope to get properly funded from that end of things. And what I mean by “properly funded” is beyond an extreme micro-budget – which we were never settling for because that would have kind of denied the original point, which was to make something that could have also competed cinematically.
My second mistake was that I didn’t focus on building a team that would be truly invested in the project – instead, I tried to do everything myself and only used production companies as my auspices, without having them invest much time into helping me fund the project. Having a team that is actually artistically invested in what you’re doing is even more important for gaining legitimacy than having the auspices of a legal entity. And, also, even when I was under the auspices of a production company, I was contacting potential funders and producers and programmers on my own behalf, using my own email address, and, unfortunately, to people who are in charge of programming, this seems like something only someone who isn’t good enough to be presented – like product – by a third party would have to do. It makes sense, then, that my project went the furthest when it was being presented by a director and producer rather than me, the performer – but, as you heard, even that is no guarantee. At this point, though, I think I simply wouldn’t proceed with a project until I had people around me willing to do most of the work of gathering funds.
And then there was a third problem – and that was not being bold enough with how I was conceiving my projects. Even though they were both quite niche, there was also something safe about them – the use of existing repertoire, the fact that they stayed firmly within the realm of fairly straight-laced classical singing and standard notation and more-or-less linear storytelling. I was actually playing it safe.
It wasn’t long after this that I started questioning the premise. What if classical singing was just too limiting? I started researching music theatre, and learned about repertoire and ways of singing I had never heard of at the academy. And, suddenly, anything that only involved me interpreting a piece of music from an existing score, as my previous projects all did, seemed – just, not enough. If I was to stand out at all, I needed to create my shows from the ground up, create my own musico-theatrical format – and that new format would be rawly-theatrical and it would be singer-led and have the potential to speak to an audience outside of classical-music and opera.
Now, cut to me making this impassioned pitch to a French committee at the High Conservatory in Lyon to be admitted to their experimental Artist Diploma program, one which kind of straddled academe and the local independent theatre and music scene. It was an audacious pitch – and, make no mistake, it was more words than reality, at this point, and I didn’t have a clear sense of how I was going to do any of what I promised, but that seemed to be okay, in this case, because I was essentially applying to an artistic residency, an “empty space” within which to try something in a semi-professional context, even if it failed – that was the whole premise of this Artist Diploma. And it turns out that was the kind of space I needed at that point – a space to take risks, not one where every element of risk had to be accounted for and mitigated, as is the case with projects in “the real world.”
Yes, one way of putting it was that I went back into the oasis of the academy, and this did feel like a huge gamble – but I worked within that protected space always thinking about how I was going to use what I learned out there in the real world, which I had now experienced and could better prepare for. In episode two of this podcast, which was about education, I said I would recommend only investing in continued education that teaches new skills, not ones you had already learned as a “classically-trained” performer. And – by sheer, luck, really – the Artist Diploma provided a space for me to fill in what I needed to learn, which was a way of building a theatrical show totally different than what I had learned as a classical singer, using elements outside of music scores and pure classical singing.
And this is where I wonder if I hadn’t been too seduced – or perhaps prematurely seduced – by this idea of being an independent self-starter outside of the academy. I wasn’t ready to do that when I first tried, because I hadn’t really become the artists I needed to be – as evidenced by the relative conventionalises of the projects I came up with. But I think that’s kind of the case for many performers who want to pivot into a more self-starter mode – they need to change first as artists, and I really wish there were more semi-professional spaces like the Artist Diploma I attended – crucially, programs that wouldn’t involve the racket of high tuition and debt – in which to do that. If there are any arts administrators wondering what they could do for young artists and the arts – it would be to work on building post-secondary-education residencies like this.
I also want to be fair about the pitfalls of this idea of being “bold” or “unconventional”: Right before the Artist Diploma, in my last year before moving to France, I teamed up with a dramaturg to put on a concert on ecological farms, the idea being that the audience would walk from place to place on a farm (we did find a farm to co-produce with us) and the musicians would pause and play at different stations on the farm property. To me it sounds, yet again, like a really conventional – even clichéd – idea but the dramaturg and I each handed one grant proposal in (by now I had already learned not to do it all myself) and again, didn’t get any money and – when I met with a representative of one of the funds, they actually said the project was “too unconventional” and that they would have been more likely to fund a regular concert at a church or community centre. The lesson once again is that you either have to find funds to match the project or change the project to match the funds. However, sometimes it’s hard to tell ahead of time what a particular funding body will find “too experimental” or “too conventional” – so there’s an aspect of this you can’t predict.
Also, I never got financial support for a creative project, whether conventional or bold, until I was taken in by the Artist Diploma, at which point I did get a grant from the Société Générale (though it was one of those retroactive grants where they reimburse you for everything you spend on the project up until a certain amount). It’s not clear to me, though, what that means – is it because it was an internal grant of a conservatory where I was only competing with other students or because I was being more bold?
And, I also want to acknowledge that I do know of even fairly ambitious though also conventional projects that get funding from all sorts of private and public sources which are led by younger and more inexperienced artists than I was when I first tried to fund something. Some people may just be more gifted than I am at selling projects and building teams.
Which brings me, perhaps, to the fourth mistake I made which led to my funding failures, though it wasn’t so much a mistake as a character flaw: I am a doubter. I doubt everything, question everything, am constantly of two minds. I’m constantly trying to see things from some kind of broader, less-personal, “objective” perspective from which I always see myself as objectively undeserving of funding. I’m constantly consumed by self-doubt, rumination, and what’s called (though I really hate-that term because I secretly think it’s an oxymoron) overthinking. So, in subtle ways, however dogged I was in the macro, on the micro-level I perhaps did things in a way that were deeply influenced by my self-doubt – for example, the fact that I often accepted doing everything alone.
Everything negative has its positive, though, and the positive side of being a doubter is that you think about things a lot and so, at some point during all my funding fumbles, I developed the habit of looking at the “sponsored by” sections of the programs of various creative projects and arts institutions and trying to piece together what the big picture was of arts funding. And that’s when I developed this idea of the 5 funding models: Public, Private, Commercial, Crowdfunding, and Self-funding. Like I said in the beginning, these categories are based on who is investing in an artistic project and what they expect to get in return.
So, the rest of this episode is going to be dedicated to going into more detail on all five funding models in the order I listed them:
1) Public funding: This is also called government funding – the government can be national, regional, or municipal, or, like in the case of EU funding, international, or it can even include publicly-funded non-profit agencies. Governments and government-funded non-profit agencies generally-speaking do not expect to make money in return for investing in the arts. Instead, they get immaterial things back – for example the preservation of a cultural heritage or the cultural development of a region or the wellbeing of its citizens or even raising awareness of certain subjects. EU arts funds, for example, really push cross-country collaboration because the EU is trying to be a single political entity while actually being made up of all these countries that have different histories and different languages (it’s a wonder it has gone as well as it has, honestly) so, putting money into cross-cultural artistic collaborations is a way that the EU feels it can support a sense of cultural unity. Every regional theatre I ever sang at in the Czech Republic was publicly funded, often by a combination of the Ministry of Culture and some regional funds, as legacy institutions in European countries are, while some of the smaller, more experimental projects I’ve done were usually under the auspices of organisations (galleries, museums) which were themselves mostly publicly funded, so it was public-funding once-removed. When larger, “legacy” organisations get public money, they tend to get more or less a carte-blanche – in other words, I’ve noticed, as with publicly-funded universities, that there doesn’t seem to be much of a desire to oversee the product – the institution is trusted to kind of oversee itself. For smaller projects, however, if they are directly funded through public grants, it’s a different story – there, as with the Erasmus grant I tried to apply for, there is minute meddling in how a project is to be presented and executed and what it’s goals are supposed to be.
2. Private funding: That’s when wealthy individuals or family foundations or private companies invest money in the arts and what they hope to get in return is prestige, or influence, or legacy, or maybe a sense of doing a good deed though I think that goes under prestige, influence and legacy. For individuals, prestige can sometimes mean getting to be a member of the artistic board of a theatre or in the case of bequests a boost to their family name or for a company it’s essentially advertising via being associated with something benevolent. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, is funded by wealthy families and endowments but also by Pfeiser and Rollex watches, among other companies. But then, so is the National Theatre in my native Prague, which probably does get quite a bit of funding from the Ministry of Culture – in addition, however, they are partners with the Czech branch of Reiffeisen bank and a major Czech insurance company just to name two of many. I’ve also encountered small projects which were, to me inexplicably, funded by various for-profit companies. Companies can take this money off of their taxes, which I guess can make it more attractive to them, but I also kind of don’t understand why they would fund very small projects. Funnily enough, I was once advised to approach lottery companies to fund my film project. As with most attempts, I sent a few unanswered emails and they were clearly not interested – but the fact it was suggested to me means it’s something independent projects might sometimes succeed at.
I just want to pause on public and private funding for a second before moving on to the next three types: The more I think about public and private funding, the less I really see much of a difference, in terms of impact. Both public and private funding can work well – or not. And the pitfalls seem to be similar: Namely, the funder – whether private or public – may have too much control over how the money is used or ask that their personal agendas be advanced through the funded art, instead of giving artists full freedom. This isn’t at all universally the case, however, and it doesn’t seem to be the case more with one model over the other – though that might be just my lack of experience, I don’t know. Let me know if you know something I don’t about that – as always there’s a, if you wish anonymous, contact form in the show notes. There can also be some kind of bias or nepotism with any allocated funding, whether from the public or private sector – but given that there is a subjective element to all this, I would say there’s not much one can do about that except just have more funding so that a greater variety of projects can get support.
Now, from what I can find, there is about 14 times more public funding in Europe per capita than in the United States (and I’m using these two places as a comparison as usual because those are just the places I know most about and they happen to contrast with each other in terms of approach to the arts – I have some sources in the footnotes, linked in the show-notes, as always) and I’ve heard the opinion that public funding is what makes Europe overall embrace and support experimental art more than the US, the idea being that publicly-funded projects have less incentive to be accessible to the general public. And while I see where this claim is coming from, I kind of don’t know if that’s something we can say unequivocally is due to more public funding as I’ve heard it presented – or that the relative (and certainly not universal) conservatism and/or “popiness” of American contemporary art is in turn caused by lack of public funding. I guess what I mean is correlation is not causation. How do we know that the values that compel Europe to publicly fund the arts some 14 times more than the US are not the same set of values that independently compel European artists and arts organisations to create more experimental, challenging, heady, “out there,” not-very-publicly-accessible projects? When it comes to funding in the US vs. the EU, I would say it isn’t the type of funding but the amount of it, that’s the issue. The more funding you have for the arts per capita the greater the variety of artists funded and the more risks artists will be able to take – doesn’t matter as much where the money is coming from. The question of course is – can private funding be as robust as public funding?
Moving on to the last three types of funding…
3. Commercial funding: This is when an investor – perhaps a production company – invests money into an artistic project with the intent of making a profit. Surprisingly, the commercial model is not only reserved for blockbuster movies, popular TV shows, and some Broadways musicals – though certainly that’s what it’s mostly associated with. The tourist concerts of classical music’s greatest hits which I used to sing back in Prague were also totally commercial. Dinner theatres, for example, are for-profit as are certain pretty experimental shows – I’m thinking here specifically of Sleep No More, an immersive theatre experience, which has had a long run in New York and has probably made quite some money. One pattern that I see with these more niche, small-scale, for-profit arts ventures is that they are either done in historical cities, in places where there are a lot of tourists who can provide a steady supply of new audience members, and it also helps perhaps to do them in countries where tourists are richer than locals, so the organisers can charge a lot of money by local standards but not by the tourists’ standards. A second patters I see – one connected to both dinner theatres and even something more experimental like Sleep No More, which was attached to a cocktail bar- is that you have to involve food or drinks in some significant way. It has to be an outing, not just an artistic experience.
4. Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding is not a new idea and you could say that there are two types – the more conventional idea of many small donations, which is still used by arts institutions, certainly in the US, to supplement the bigger chunks of money coming in but then there’s a very interesting newer model, connected with the internet. That second way is a very young model, and it’s unclear to me to what extent it was a late-aughts-early-2010s flash in the pan and how much it can actually be put to use at this point, but the idea of this funding model is that creators themselves amass a following, through making some kind of freely-available online content, and that following then crowdfunds a budget for them – through monthly patronage, like on Patreon, or to fund a specific project like on Kickstarter. But as William Deresiewicz talks about in his book The Death of the Artist, which mostly spotlights crowdfunded artists though that doesn’t seem to be intentional, the Kickstarter boom is kind of over – though there certainly still are creators who make money through Patreon, Kickstarter and newer platforms like Substack – though many of them are not amassing a following as artists. The issue is that what does well online, especially on social media where most people spend time, is not the arts, per say – it’s mostly self-help and education or some combination thereof, at least that is what seems to fuel durable platforms because it’s important to distinguish between getting attention online (through playing your comedic skits or examples of your artistic work) and actually being able to build a monetizable audience, there. In general, an artist has to create something that is primarily about self-help or education to amass a following on those cheap-attention-driven platforms that have come to dominate the internet – and then and only then can they collect money to put towards actual artistic projects. But even when you succeed at this, there are pitfalls, because audience capture is real. When you speak to creators who have done well under this model, it’s not clear whether amassing your own online audience is really a path towards freedom, or just a different kind of dependency – instead of being dependent on institutions you’re dependent on the amygdala-highjacks of ever-more-overstimulated scrollers. Although that latter description might actually be the more recent iteration of the internet – it seems that what used to be called the true fan (and apparently you used to need just 1000 of them to be an independent artist) is harder to come by, because follows no longer mean anything, as Jack Conte, once crowdfunded artist and founder of Patreon, lamented in a recent SXSW talk “The Death of the Follower.” In general, the internet has become this fluid stream of content, with only few loyal communities forming recently around particular creators – let alone around artists. Also, and we’ll talk more about this in the next episode, there is by design – by math – only a small number of people who can actually succeed durably at this crowdfunded model.
5. Self-Funding: This last type of funding is artists investing their own money into projects, in order to continue to create work, build a portfolio, create a network. It’s basically artists investing in themselves – and despite how illegitimate this model may seem, note that a lot of experimental art, even important works in the cannon, were funded this way. Again, we’ll talk about this more next time but the problem does seem to be that the internet has kind of sucked away the attention and energy people have for live performance and for the raw, unusual, experimental and low-budget, and this puts individual artists into a more difficult position when it comes to having relevance – especially as, independent artists.
So – those are the five basic models of arts funding – according to me.
Bear in mind that, like I said at the beginning, most projects cobble together funding using several different types from the list above.
For example, it’s common for performing arts institutions, or even individual performance projects, to get money from government grants, family foundations, a few private companies, crowdfunding, and ticket sales. Though I realise my system starts to get a bit weird when you consider that ticket sales almost never cover the budget, let alone make a profit, in the “classical” performing arts – no matter how large or well-established the institution – and so I’m not sure if that would put ticket sales in the commercial zone or just under crowdfunding.
But, you get the idea – money for the arts comes from different places for different reasons and with different expectations, and different funding suits different formats.
Also, it seems that there is a snowball effect – funding begets funding. The more funded you are, the more likely other will want to invest.
But, if you’re starting from scratch, what I hope that I’ve expressed through the description of my initial – and probably not final – mistakes, is that the first part of funding a project is not applying or soliciting the funding – you need an idea that has reasonable potential to be funded, and a team. Once you have a pitch which is well-matched to funding and a passionate team to help you pull it through, then you can go about actually pursuing the funds.
Sometimes, though, individual artists do need a home, a place where they don’t have to be entrepreneurs – sometimes they’re called laboratories. So I do think it’s smart, early on, to seek to collaborate and perform with more established institutions and companies which will allow you to use them as a laboratory – not in the way I did, where I did all the work, but in a way where they are motivated to do the practical work for you.
In both cases – it’s not a linear process. It’s a back and forth between what you want and what the funding or organisation requires. Those oases where you can create anything you want are few and far between. But working with constraints requires just as much creativity as having full freedom.
Next week, I want to go into that looming presence: the internet, which really changed how the performing arts are valued. You’re listening to this podcast on some version of the internet and a podcast is a format born on the internet. It gets meta. In any case, you cannot talk about surviving as a performer in the 21st century without trying to understand how the internet has fundamentally changed our world.
In the meantime, let me know what your experiences with arts funding have been. Would you make any amendments to my 5 types of funding? Do you think I’m right about the mistakes I made, or do you think something else went wrong that I’m not seeing? Have you succeeded at funding your projects – and if you did, how? Or, if you didn’t, what did you learn? You can answer these questions – and/or make any other comments or corrections – at the (if you wish anonymous) form linked in the show notes.
Footnotes & Sources:
Justin O’Conor: Culture is Not an Industry (2024) (this is more a “works consulted” than “works cited” – you can also listen to this lecture based on the book)
Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message
Here is an interesting 2005 comparison of arts funding in different countries (some EU countries, the UK, and the US) by the Canadian Council for the Arts.
I found this impassioned comparison of the EU and US arts funding, titled “Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill (A Personal Commentary On American and European Cultural Funding)” (2004) by composer by William Osborne, an Americans who spent a lot of time in Europe, very interesting.
When it comes to my source for European art being considered more experimental than American contemporary art, this is simply something talked about in arts circles – and it is also my observation (though, like I say, American art’s popiness and conservatism is not universal.)
Osborne, however, in his above-mentioned article, talks about it indirectly when he warns of “the dangers of conformity in mass markets” and how this pertains to the arts in the US. Below is a quote that sums up his position on that particular point (being less experienced with the American scene, I hesitate to make such a strong claim myself):
“In America, the neo-liberal paradigm has already given a corporate atmosphere to our culture that is stronger than ever before in history, and stronger than in any other country in the world. So why are we being asked to go even farther in this direction? Generally speaking, if any one system of support for artists becomes isomorphic, artistic freedom suffers. Varied systems help guarantee freedom of artistic expression. This is why Europeans have a vibrant and healthy system of decentralized public funding to provide an alternative to the commercialization of culture.” – William Osborne
I agree that the idea of decentralized funding is important – though American arts funding does not appear to me to be more centralized compared to Europe. Like I say in the episode, it really just seems to be the amount of funding that’s the issue – and perhaps that’s because private funding could simply never keep up with public funding. However, I would like to know if that’s really the case.
William Deresiewics’s book The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020)
Jack Conte’s talk “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web” (2024)