“Kickstarter is expecting to raise more than $150 million for its users’ projects in 2012. That’s $4 million more than the ‘entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts.'”

“I would add that another key difference is that the NEA mostly funds nonprofits, which have to meet certain state and national requirements to ensure fiscal responsibility. When not funding nonprofits, it provides grants to individual artists, who must fill out long applications, which are vetted and selected by experts.”

“Interestingly, of the obviously arts-ish Kickstarter funding that Johnson tallied, film/video is the biggest share, followed, in descending order, by comics, music, art, publishing, theater, photography and dance.”

“To keep everything in perspective Randy Cohen, Vice President of Research and Policy at Americans for the Arts, asserts, ‘Kickstarter’s $150 million to the arts in 2012 is ¼ of 1 percent of what is needed annually to fund the nonprofit arts sector’s $60 billion in expenditures . . . that is, 1/400th.  Or, to put it another way . . . it will take 400 Kickstarter campaigns—at $150 million each—to fund the nonprofit arts sector for a single year.;”

“Last week 14,952 strangers raised more than $1 million for a cause they believed in: not disaster relief or a cure for cancer, but a web-only comic book. “

“In the comments of the last post, Yancey stated that 70% of Kickstarter’s disbursements happened last year. So from that we can estimate that 2011, Kickstarter disbursed 65.5 Million to core arts funding. Less than half of the NEA’s budget. The point of my original post stands: it’s not close. While my numbers were wildly off, so was comparing Kickstarter’s arts funding to the NEA’s.”

“The NEA and Kickstarter exist to fund different art of the arts ecology in this country, and in order for the sector to thrive, we need both,” said Victoria Hutter, an NEA spokesperson, in an email to TPM.”

“And frankly, the seeds of this movement were planted back when the NEA stopped funding individual artists in the 1990′s. Had that process continued right through the culture wars, there may be less of a need for crowdsourcing today.”