Kickstarter Beats Government in Arts Funding

Move over Medici, hordes of Americans with passion projects are coming. Since its inception, crowd-funding site Kickstarter has funded over $600 million in arts projects, and $323.6 million in 2012 alone. The National Endowment for the Arts, long a political target, has an annual budget of only $146 million, of which only 80 percent are grants. And while individual donors have long been the backbone of the art world (arts nonprofits spent $60 billion last year), the disparity in collective action supporting the arts on Kickstarter versus the government is stark.