Back in July, my colleague Paul Karon spoke with Northeastern University researcher Louis Shekhtman, who, along with two colleagues, crunched electronic Form 990 data to generate a revealing look at foundations’ science and medical research giving. The team found that these institutions provided more support to the field than conventional wisdom would suggest, even matching the total outlays of the federal government, long considered the largest funder of science by leaps and bounds.
Shekhtman and his research partner, Hungarian-American physicist Albert-László Barabási, then turned their attention to the vast world of arts philanthropy. As someone who keeps an eye on trends in the space and has spent countless hours combing through migraine-inducing Form 990s, I was curious to see what the pair uncovered.
In what they called the “largest and most comprehensive data-driven exploration of giving by foundations to art to date,” Shekhtman and Barabási analyzed 3.6 million IRS 990 tax forms from arts foundations for the decade between 2010 and 2019 and identified $36 billion in grants from 46,643 foundations to 48,766 recipients. While Shekhtman and Barabási did not look at corporations or individual donors, they did scrape data from family foundations, which often act as proxies for individual giving. You can check out a preprint version of the report here.
One of the big takeaways from the report on science funding was the tendency of philanthropy to fund the field differently than the U.S. government. For example, major science funders like the Gates Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation steer a disproportionate share of dollars to organizations in their home states. Uncle Sam, in contrast, tends to distribute money more equally across the country.
Shekhtman and Barabási’s report identified a similar dynamic in the arts space, where they classified 61% of dollars as “local,” meaning that the recipient is in the same state as the foundation. As you’d expect, a lot of these dollars come in the form of huge gifts to the sector’s usual and most prestigious suspects like the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met).
The percentage of arts grants awarded locally (56%), however, is considerably higher than in science (35%). The pair attributed the difference accordingly: “Whereas in science, a donor may choose to support research at a distant university if the focus of the work advances the donor’s personal and philanthropic goals, in art, a donor is more likely to support local institutions whose exhibitions or performances are readily accessible to both the donor and their community.” Drilling a bit deeper, Shekhtman and Barabási found that 22,223 funders (48%) exclusively support arts institutions in their home state.
The other huge difference between funding for the arts and sciences has to do with amounts given. Combined funding for science was much greater than combined funding for the arts. And while foundation funding for science was about the same as government funding, foundation support for the arts was an order of magnitude larger than government arts funding.
The National Institutes of Health allocates around $30.1 billion annually to medical research. That’s roughly the same figure Shekhtman and Barabási came up with in quantifying philanthropy’s annual support for the field. In contrast, Congress appropriated just $180 million to the National Endowment for the Arts in 2022, while the pair identified $36 billion in foundation grants to arts organizations over the course of 10 years.
“Taken together,” the report states, “we find that in art, there are more organizations competing for less funds from fewer funders compared to science.”
Shekhtman and Barabási also analyzed who was listed as board members on arts institutions’ Form 990s. These individuals can serve on multiple boards, so the pair ran an analysis to see areas of overlap. Zeroing in on institutions in New York City, they found that individuals rarely serve on the boards of other institutions within the same field. That is, an individual may serve on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Lincoln Center, which is a performing arts organization, but not for the Whitney Museum, which could be viewed as MoMA’s competitor.
It’s also important to remember that while Shekhtman and Barabási didn’t look at individual giving, board members are frequently — if not exclusively — donors to their respective institutions. “One of the big surprises for us was how exclusive art board memberships are,” Barabási told me. “It’s expected that your collection as well as your money goes toward that institution and not spill over. There’s a strict expectation of loyalty.” This stands in contrast to other fields. “If you serve on the board of Coca-Cola, that makes you attractive to other beverage companies,” Barabási said.
The pair found a handful of exceptions to this trend, such as the Black Family, although there’s something of a catch, as they split their allegiances along spousal lines. Billionaire Leon Black, who cofounded private equity firm Apollo Global Management, is the chairman of the MoMA, and his wife, Debra, is a trustee of the Met.
Shekhtman and Barabási’s work yielded another set of deliverables, and they’re probably not what you’d expect. Pulling from this avalanche of data, Barabási created a series of visual descriptions illustrating linkages between funders in such a way as to resemble pieces of futuristic or modernist art. Postmasters Gallery in New York City will be exhibiting Barabási’s work beginning in late September.
Looking ahead, Shekhtman and Barabási are embarking on a separate project to gauge the breadth of individual donations by pulling from crowdsourced data and arts organizations’ annual reports, which occasionally list donors and gift amounts. This effort will go a long way to quantitatively illustrating the extent to which giving from individual donors (presumably) exceeds that of foundations. “I don’t think we can see the full scope of individual donations because we don’t have the systematic data yet,” Barabási said. “But what you’re seeing in this paper is our first step in that direction.”