In 2014, the National Endowment for the Arts had a budget of $146 million. That same year the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter raised $264 million for art-related projects, like Ai Weiwei’s installation in Alcatraz, the revival of Reading Rainbow, and singer-songwriter Steve Grand’s first recorded album. “The way that art has been funded has shifted from the church to the aristocracy to the state … toward audience support,” says Brian Newman, a consultant for arts-related business development and the former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute. Through Kickstarter, more than 9 million people have directly supported a total of almost 100,000 projects—an innovation that Newman calls the “democratization of the field.”
