Art Basel and Kickstarter partnership: is this the future of arts funding?

Non-profit visual arts bodies worldwide have been given a helping hand by an unlikely ally. Art Basel – the world’s biggest art fair, with editions held annually in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong – recently launched a crowdfunding venture in partnership with Kickstarter, the far-reaching online funding platform for creative projects.

The new initiative gives organisations a prime virtual slot to fundraise for special projects. The first seven schemes, presented on Art Basel’s “curated” page on Kickstarter, have been selected by an independent jury made up of three non-profit art world specialists.

More than $1.4bn has been pledged by more than 7.4m people in the past five years on Kickstarter, while Art Basel’s social media empire has more than 155,000 Twitter followers and 93,600 Instagram devotees.

“This is a bridge between our global community and these non-profits,” says Marc Spiegler, director of Art Basel, who is adamant that non-commercial spaces must remain part of the 21st-century art panorama. “It’s not just about the fairs; we need an art world in which interesting art is being made. Patronage is volatile, and the most avant-garde spaces struggle for profits and prominence.”

But some sections of the media have been critical of the move. Culture website Hyperallergic said: “Art Basel is merely bringing its brand to bear on crowdfunding, recruiting some curators and other art world types to curate projects for a special page on Kickstarter. That’s it. Just setting up a portal of sorts.”

Spiegler argues that the institutions involved would otherwise not have been able to raise the total sum of $167,844. So why doesn’t Art Basel just give the money directly to the non-profits?

“We are not picking the winners. We are putting projects on the broader art world’s radar,” he insists. “While Art Basel has donated in the past [it gave $50,000 to support galleries in New York after hurricane Sandy], we have never given as much money as was raised in these first two months of the campaign.”

Some of the venues selected for the initiative extol the benefits of being Art Basel’s crowdfunding guinea pigs. These include the Delfina Foundation in London, which launched a campaign to raise money for research into performance art from across the Arab world, encompassing the Middle East and north Africa.

The organisation aimed to raise £15,000 for artist and curators’ residencies in London and the Arab region (eventually £17,158 was pledged; on Kickstarter all the initiatives must be fully funded within 60 days or the project gets nothing).

Aaron Cezar, director of Delfina, is evangelical about the scheme. “The Kickstarter campaign was effectively the public launch of the project itself; therefore we were able to fulfil both our fundraising and PR needs,” he says.

He realised that the project would appeal to a specific audience in the Arab world, galvanising scholars across the region – but the enterprise also attracted new donors in the “community at large” who can be cultivated long-term. Individuals also came forward with research ideas, information about unknown archives and other key contacts.

Another participant, Aaron Seeto, director of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, also realised that crowdfunding campaigns are as much about profile-building as they are about raising funds. “Through this campaign we were able to mobilise both our Australian and international networks,” he says. “On our own, we wouldn’t have been able to generate as much interest.”

Thanks to 84 backers who gave A$20,405, Chinese art collective Yangjiang Group will present a special project in the Australian gallery next year. But Seeto adds: “From our experience, crowdfunding has its limitations: they are extremely hungry social media campaigns, requiring dedicated human resources and time.”

Devising the “rewards” given to donors is a key factor: the Delfina Foundation offered those who pledged £2,500 or more an invitation to a “family lunch” with resident artists; at 4A, benefactors who gave A$10 got a “shout out” on Facebook.

Artist Marina Abramovic raised eyebrows last year by offering hugs for $1 as part of a Kickstarter campaign (she raised $661,454 for the design phase of her planned performance art centre in New York state). Kickstarter rules stipulate that: “Projects can’t fundraise for charity, offer financial incentives, or involve prohibited items.” The company gets 5 per cent commission on any funds raised for successful proposals.

We are not picking the winners. We are putting projects on the broader art world’s radar

How this new, lucrative income generator slots into the funding landscape remains to be seen. Art Basel emphasises that “public funding for the arts has been dwindling”; Cezar says crowdfunding can complement other funding sources and be “hugely effective” for specific projects, but stresses that “organisations like ours still need to raise money the old-fashioned way to maintain our core operations and programmes”.

Significantly, regional museums in the UK and US are dipping their toes in the crowdfunding pool. Earlier this year, the Art Fund charity launched its own crowdfunding platform, Art Happens; the first five participating museums include the Bowes Museum in County Durham, and St Fagans National History Museum in Cardiff. The former secured a 15th-century Flemish altarpiece with £21,163, but the Welsh museum failed to hit its target for the reconstruction of an Iron Age farmstead.

British museums have yet to embrace crowd-sourced fundraising fully, but have asked the public for contributions: in 2007, Tate and the Art Fund launched an appeal to save Turner’s watercolour “The Blue Rigi, Sunrise” (1842); 11,000 people duly donated over £552,000.

In France, major museums are mining this seam; the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has launched a crowdfunding appeal via the Ulule company to find backing for the €600,000 conservation of Gustave Courbet’s “The Artist’s Studio” (1855). The museum wanted the public to contribute at least €30,000 (more than €83,000 has rolled in; the museum’s canny “next objective” is to garner €100,000).

But some culture professionals fear that governments may see this income source as a substitute for state backing. “In France, the generosity of individuals, companies and foundations seems infinite, which is great news for heritage projects,” says French art critic Didier Rykner. “But politicians must not see this as an opportunity to reduce grants; sponsorship, including crowdfunding, should not replace public money but supplement it.”.

Nazy Vassegh, chief executive of Masterpiece fair in London, gives a pithy analysis, saying that this group patronage is an “energised form of philanthropy” that succeeds because donors feel like part of a community. Art Basel’s audience of moneyed patrons are already showing their community spirit.

A discussion on crowdfunding will take place at the Art Salon on December 5, artbasel.com/en/crowdfunding