Last month, the Scottish government came up with a one-time grant of £300,000 to cover the Edinburgh International Book Festival, after pressure from environmental protestors caused the previous sponsor, Baillie Gifford, to back out. This week in Canada, its premier book award, the Giller Prize, having lost its primary sponsor, Scotiabank, after protests, has appealed to the Canadian government to keep things afloat: Without stable funding, the Giller Foundation says the prize will be forced to end operations at the … [Read more...]
Archives for July 2025
Should we subsidize arts consumers, art producers, or neither?
My friends Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan have started a new venture, Arts Analytics, where they hope to bring more extensive, and shared, use of data into arts policy thinking, and also to spur discussion. A recent post of theirs asked what is actually an old question in the arts policy world: if we are going to subsidize the arts, is it best done through grants to arts producers, or through running the subsidy through arts consumers? They think we ought to give more consideration to the latter: A demand-centered reframing would … [Read more...]