Crowdfunding for visual artists: Alternative or complementary financing mode?
Lazzaro, Elisabetta and Nordgård, Daniel (2025) Crowdfunding for visual artists: Alternative or complementary financing mode? In: Law and Finance in International Art Markets: Tools for the Future. Routledge.
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This chapter offers a novel taxonomy to disentangle and assess crowdfunding benefits identified by the theoretical and empirical literature, which we deploy through measurable categories. We apply the taxonomy to observable campaign features of less traditionally tradable contemporary visual art, namely art installations and performance art, for which crowdfunding could hence play an alternative or complementary role with respect to traditional intermediaries, such as art galleries, dealers and auctions, as well to museums and public institutions. Based on an original dataset combining information on Kickstarter campaigns between 2009 and 2002 and art-market data, we show that crowdfunding offers a number of relevant benefits for performance art and art installations, in addition to its direct financial success, and for democratization. For the two media, however, other crowdfunding benefits differ. In comparison to performance art, for art installations crowdfunding represents an alternative, rather than a complementary, funding model, and fosters a relatively higher community involvement and interaction and co-creation with backers. Installation artists campaigners also present relatively higher levels of entrepreneurship and business skills development compared to performance artists. For both media, the global crowdfunding platform Kickstarter was found to play a relevant re-intermediation effect, yet mitigated by the partnership with a major traditional art-market gatekeeper Art Basel for performance art.
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