ABSTRACT
This final chapter makes policy suggestions following on from arguments put forward earlier in Funding the Arts, allowing readers to see what funding programmes informed by those arguments might look like. The suggestions are not original. They closely resemble recommendations made by the US economist Dick Netzer in his 1978 book The Subsidized Muse—in origin a report commissioned by the US Twentieth Century Fund, subsequently published by Cambridge University Press. Netzer reached his conclusions via an economic, data-analytic route. Funding the Arts gets to the same place by other means.
Predictable formula funding for organizations with strong self-earned income generating track records is a key recommendation, reassuring those organizations’ supporters that their financial contributions as ticket purchasers will unlock matching funding system support. Organizations in the declining and command economic sectors, being mainly or wholly dependent on the funding system for their survival, can reasonably be expected to deliver public services that meet funding system specifications. The degree of risk associated with new business start-ups in the arts may be too extreme for public funders to run except in partnership with commercial investors or in profit-share association with arts promoters who are prepared to take equivalent risks themselves.
