ABSTRACT
Funders sustaining organizations that would not exist without them have to decide what conditions to apply when grants are offered, confirmed and re-confirmed year after year. Whose interests are art producers in the command economic sector meant to serve? Extreme supplier-orientation and extreme user-orientation are poles at either end of a continuum of choice open to organizations highly dependent on funding, to the extent that funders leave it open. (Supplier-orientated organizations make the art they want to make and then look round for audiences who might be willing to engage with it; user-orientated organizations identify the audiences they wish to serve and then create art likely to appeal to those audiences.)
Funding systems captured by high-prestige, politically influential art-producing organizations can be relied on to issue commands with which their captors are pleased to comply. Suppliers in effective charge of systems supposedly monitoring their performance and holding them to public account can then write rules suiting themselves. This chapter explores the anti-social consequences of supplier-orientated arts subsidy regimes, and suggests ways to strike a fair balance between producer and potential consumer interests when taxpayers are compelled to cover almost the entire cost of service provision.
