Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA

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

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.

hooray!

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.

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.