Vis a vis Clay's post about a foundation for the Center or Centre ;-) I attended a symposium a couple of years ago with British and American participants. One of the British had actually started a fashion museum in England. Interestingly, she received most of her financial support from the contributions of Americans, claiming that Americans had a tradition of giving for such purposes, and that the British did not. I did not have the opportunity to ask if British people receive a tax write-off for charitable giving to cultural institutions or not. Much of the tradition of giving in the US is helped along by the fact that the money you give to a non-profit is not included in the amount that your income tax is calculated on. So, whereas it is not a tax credit, as in the sense of "I'll give it to the museum instead of the government", at least you are not forking over 33 cents to the government for every dollar given to the non-profit, so it is relatively cheap money. I have no idea whether an American could write off a contribution to a British non-profit, however. I got the impression that the British pay for their cultural institutions, more through their taxes, passing through government hands and preferences, than through individual contributions to institutions that they personally liked. Another British member of the symposium tried to explain a recent scheme put into effect by the British government called "capitalization", under which museums and universities were put into the same pool with each other and money distributed from public funds according to some formula that favored universities over museums. The term capitalization seemed to be in reference to the number of people (as in per capita) that were helped by the organization, so that, while the number of people going to a university was easy to calculate, the number of people helped by a museum was impossible to calculate. This seemed to be having the effect of killing all the museums in England, if the speaker were to be believed. I found it quite fascinating that two, out of possibly four English participants spent symposium time speaking at great length and vehemence about these changes and funding problems for British museums, whereas, none of the Americans participants felt the need to predict Armageddon for our cultural institutions due to a change in governmental funding policy. Also, I have heard that since American museums depend so much on individual contributions and do not receive proportionately as much from the government as European museums, that it sets up a different atmosphere, for good or bad, in the way the museum is run and its priorities. (Some might say, more crowd pleasing blockbusters, less serious scholarship?) I would be interested to hear from Europeans how their museums are, in fact, financed, and what the impact is. I wonder if Clay's proposal, although perfectly sensible in the US, has the infrastructure to be successful in Britain. Devon.
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