Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA

Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.

The milestone is “good” in the sense that it means that Kickstarter may now reach a point where it will funnel as much money to the arts as the federal agency primarily responsible for supporting them, effectively doubling the amount of art that can get funded in the country. “But maybe it shouldn’t be that way,” said Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler, “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.” It’s worth pointing out that Kickstarter is quite different from the NEA. The 3-year-old website allows users to post their own random ideas for projects — everything from iPod Nano watches to children’s books on reproduction — and solicit donations from the rest of the Internet to turn them into reality. Kickstarter does restrict the kinds of projects it will allow to be posted on its website to “projects with a creative purpose.” As the site’s guidelines state: “Kickstarter can be used to fund projects from the creative fields of Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater. We currently only support projects from these categories.”