Values behind Arts Funding in the Netherlands

The current economic crisis has led to cutbacks in government spending on the arts in virtually all European states. At the same time the advent of crowdfunding seems to allow the wider public a role in financing artistic production. These developments necessitate research into the role of private arts funders that goes beyond the mere opposition between artistic and commercial values, a dichotomy largely dependent on the ‘classic’ denial of economics in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production. In this article we discuss useful theoretical perspectives on the relationships between the arts and its public and private funders, specifically the works of Judith Balfe (1993) and Hans van Maanen (2009). Using the concept of value regimes as introduced by Boltanski, Thévenot and Chiapello (2005, 2006), we present a taxonomy of the values underlying funding systems that moves beyond the artistic/commercial dichotomy. This helps to understand and assess the tensions that the arts’ reliance on a wider variety of donors may entail