The title compares all the money given out by Kickstarter (including non-art projects) to NEA's budget, which as of now 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.
The second apples and oranges point is stronger though: Look at the types of projects that NEA funds, e.g. translation projects in 2011 (http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/LitTranslation.htm...): 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 The Mirror was not understood by the people so he had difficulty getting his other projects funded by Goskino (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky#Film_career_in...: "From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature.") That's 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).
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.
There's quite a bit truth about your comment but I think it is somewhat simplistic. To better analyze your objection, let us remove the taxpayer part first: Should art projects be funded (by whatever means) that the general public sees no value in, i.e. this is how I parsed your "no one would pay for". This goes into deep discussions about "what is art", "how do you define the value of an art object" etc. Without going into detail, let us observe that in almost all art fields it frequently happens that even the educated public's taste lags the appreciation. I don't know much about painting/sculpture etc. but examples abound in literature (one of the most famous is The Great Gatsby) and film.
So, the mechanism here is very much similar to entrepreneurship: an artist producing work of dubious value asks for support, there's considerable risk in this, i.e. the work is most probably is junk but you might as well have discovered the new Warhol or Banksy. Therefore, it's not a case of funding works "no one would pay for" but how to manage the risk.
The bigger question is: should the state be in this business, with its clueless, bloated and generally ineffective machinery? Again, avoiding the long discussions about how controlling government should be I propose (the obvious but somewhat naive) solution: government should fund some reasonable amount but the works so funded should be under joint ownership of the artist and the public, i.e. the artist should own it but the public should have perpetual view rights, at least from a web site. Continuing the NEA example I gave above, the text of those translations should be available from the NEA site. The public should get value in return, other than the moral feelgood effect of supporting artists.
> To better analyze your objection, let us remove the taxpayer part first: Should art projects be funded (by whatever means) that the general public sees no value in, i.e. this is how I parsed your "no one would pay for".
The fact that taxes are collected under threat of force is the entire basis for the objection. Any "funded" work of art, absent the use of stolen money, is by definition an artwork that someone would pay for.
The next time someone takes money from you at gunpoint, be sure to ask them whether they're doing so "to amortize the risk of finding the next Warhol or Banksy." One can hope, right?
That's a distortion. You don't mean "no one would pay", you mean "no one would pay enough", which is a very different metric. No one would pay enough to build a nice mural or sculpture in a poor neighborhood, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Likewise the translation projects in the grandparent post aren't going to appeal to the mostly English-speaking, wealthy technolibertarians like yourself. But they still have value to a lot of people.
The straightforward corrolary to what you wrote is that the artistic desires of the wealthy are inherently more valuable, which seems a little unethical to me.
> You don't mean "no one would pay", you mean "no one would pay enough"
Fair enough, but that distinction only makes a real difference if the NEA commonly does "last mile" funding (the last 5-20% to reach a threshold of viability, say). Is that the case?
> No one would pay enough to build a nice mural or sculpture in a poor neighborhood, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
1. The fact that someone has not yet paid, by some date, to build a nice mural or sculpture in some particular poor neighborhood, is not a proof that no one would pay to do so.
2. When I have participated in such projects, they were municipally funded in addition to neighborhood donations of time and materials, and I doubt any expenses were recouped from some NEA "hood aid" package.
3. If you think it's worth doing, do it.
> The straightforward corrolary to what you wrote is that the artistic desires of the wealthy are inherently more valuable
Artistic desire is a universal to which all humans are entitled. The power to commission other people of talent to create physical manifestations of my artistic desire is something I am only entitled to if I can afford to pay those people for their time and materials.
> 1. The fact that someone has not yet paid, by some date, to build a nice mural or sculpture in some particular poor neighborhood, is not a proof that no one would pay to do so.
Doesn't this invalidate your whole point then? How can it be a public disservice to fund this stuff if it's never possible to know if it's unwanted?
Shrug. I know the libertarian line on this. I just think it falls down in the face of reality. It's nice to imagine that your government is lighting your precious tax dollars on fire with its wasteful nonsense, but the real world is always more complicated.
How can it be a public disservice to fund this stuff if it's never possible to know if it's unwanted?
The theory is that in the universe of all possible projects, the vast majority are a bad idea. E.g., most startups fail. So unless we have some compelling reason to believe a project is a good idea, it is likely to be wasteful.
...but the real world is always more complicated.
This is a logical fallacy. You are claiming the world is more complicated, and then assuming the complexity hides facts or mechanisms which would support your preferred policy. But you don't even attempt to explain these mechanisms.
Your first statement asserts that the "vast majority" of NEA projects are bad ideas. Seems that reality doesn't bear that out, most of them seem reasonable to me.
And the second is weird doublethink nonsense. Asserting that reality is complicated is just the truth. It's the libertarian position that is absolutist ("the vast majority of NEA projects are bad ideas", "no one wants to fund NEA projects"). My position is that for pretty much any project, there are people who want it and people who don't. And so you need to look carefully at the evidence and fund the stuff that's good. Where's the fallacy?
Your first statement asserts that the "vast majority" of NEA projects are bad ideas. Seems that reality doesn't bear that out, most of them seem reasonable to me.
Actually no, my first statement takes the universe of all projects as a reference class.
If you think the NEA picks good projects, go ahead and argue why that is the case. You haven't done that yet, you merely said "it's never possible to know if it's unwanted." I.e., you are assuming the facts we don't know will somehow support your position.
Asserting that reality is complicated is just the truth.
But there is absolutely no reason to believe complexity supports your position over any other position.
If you want to delve into the complexity and make an argument for the NEA, do it. You haven't yet.
Absolutely right, this point is crucial. Kickstarter funds projects by voluntary and democraticly (by which I mean by citizens) means, while the government does it forcefully (taxes) and undemocratically (politicians deciding).
Popularly accessible art can be funded by things like KS, or simply by the market more generally. Art that is not (currently) popularly accessible -- stuff that is either at the frontiers, or is making a contribution that is not immediately evident to a lay person -- cannot. Is this kind of art valuable? Of course it is. Today's avante garde is tomorrow's pop art, just as today's cutting edge science is tomorrow's consumer technology (but not all of it.)
Where does this idea that art that is not "popularly accessible" cannot be supported by the market? Such art might not be supported by the mainstream or by the "lay person" as you call them, but those people do not make up the entirety of the market.
For nearly all of civilized history there have been patrons of the arts. When did these people suddenly get removed from "the market"?
(Also, note that if "avante garde" art was supported by the "lay people" [meaning it went mainstream], it would, by definition, cease being "avante garde")
The problem is that usually in arts the public taste may lag the true appreciation sometimes by centuries, so a greedy algorithm will end up not funding some of the great works of art that are considered worthless in their time.
You're misstating history. There are no "great works of art that are considered worthless in their time". They were considered valuable, if by no one else, by those that created them, and whoever happened to hang onto them, and pass them down through the ages. (After all, they still exist today.)
But in almost all cases, it wasn't just the artists who considered their works valuable: many other people did as well. That's generally why they were able to continue to produce art. Patrons, who did appreciate their work, even if the general public didn't, bought it, and supported the artists.
historically, artists were sponsored by wealthy individuals or institutions to create art. Some of the great European painters of the last few centuries were sponsored by the Catholic Church. If Kickstarter can provide that, what's the problem?
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?
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.
> Crowdfunding demonstrates that if we completely remove copyright laws: art will survive.
Yes, though I think all that was sufficient to reach that conclusion was all the art that lived long before copyright laws ever existed in the first place.
(And I hope copyright lovers admit that Shakespeare, if there was copyright in his day, would have probably created fewer works, not more. In fact it's possible he and others produced so many works precisely because there was no copy protection!)
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.
It's just your opinion, in an excerpt from the article Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler stated:
As Strickler explained, the milestone is “good” in the sense that it means that Kickstarter may now reach a point where it will funnel as much money to the arts as the federal agency primarily responsible for supporting them, effectively doubling the amount of art that can get funded in the country.
Except the problem with the NEA is that their funding source is taxpayers, many of whom are "contributing" to art against their will. The kickstarter model is much more direct and is funded and controlled by the people that want the art. It stands to reason that getting rid of the NEA would result in better art and a freer society.
I think that the quality of art is subjective. I would rather have art that many people want enough to fund directly than the art preferred by a few bureaucrats.
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.
The idea that what the NEA funds is "real art" and the associated disdain for commercially viable art is in my opinion fairly perverse.
Kickstarter provides for the following categories:
Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film&Video, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Theater, and Technology.
Every one of those except "Technology" strikes me as art, and even a few of the technology projects. So while Kickstarter may not be all arts projects, it is primarily arts projects.
The second apples and oranges point is stronger though: Look at the types of projects that NEA funds, e.g. translation projects in 2011 (http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/LitTranslation.htm...): 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 The Mirror was not understood by the people so he had difficulty getting his other projects funded by Goskino (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky#Film_career_in...: "From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature.") That's 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).
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.