World Art Managers Find New Funding Models In D.C.:
“Cultural diplomacy usually comes in the form of a traveling art exhibit or a celebrity visit to a war-torn country. But there’s a deeper kind of diplomacy taking place at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. For the past four summers, arts managers from around the world have been coming to D.C. for training on how to improve their organizations back home.
Each year’s class of fellows is a little like a United Nations of arts management. They come from every corner of the globe; Pakistan, Russia, Ecuador, Zanzibar, Cambodia and China to name a few. In most of these countries, nonprofit staples like capital campaigns and membership drives are unheard of.
‘The funding system in the United States is different than most of the world,’ says Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser. ‘We developed this private philanthropy model because of a separation of art and state that really emerged from the Puritans who thought that music and dance were evil.’
Today, an entire American industry, known as fundraising for nonprofits, has evolved from that ‘evil.'”
(Via NPR Topics: Visual Arts.)