Is there no limit to the level of individual philanthropy when it comes to both the art world, and the arts, in America? Evidently not, and who can complain, given the near-total bottoming out of any more substantial support from Bush's government.
A provocative article in The Art Newspaper highlights an ongoing growth in museum facilities, for instance in New York - at a cost in excess of $2bn - the money provided by a who's who of philanthropists. Some are familiar names (it's not surprising to see a Rockefeller mentioned), others less so: Warren Eisenberg and Leonard Feinstein, the two men behind the retail chain Bed, Bath, and Beyond, a store that has become a New York fixture. All that's missing now, apparently, are some of the city's younger hedge fund execs to begin pulling their weight, and you have a climate whose cultural largesse essentially rests on its citizenry: not new news, perhaps, but certainly new in terms of the scope of the phenomenon.
New York has always been a capital where money talks, nowhere more so than in the arts. Widen one's perspective beyond the world of the museum, and you have the renaming a season or two ago of two prime Broadway theatres for Shubert Organisation executives and impresarios Bernard B Jacobs and Gerald C Schoenfeld: two men who did much to shape the American commercial theatre over much of the last half-century, though whether they did any more than Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams - two dramatists, neither of whom has a Broadway theatre in his name - is certainly open to debate. What's interesting is how quickly outrage settles into acceptance when it comes to resisting such rebranding, given the hymn to high finance that such nomenclature implies. At various times, some fuss or other has been made about the renaming of Broadway theatres as the Cadillac this or Ford that, but one of the most sought-after 42nd Street venues remains the Roundabout Theatre Co's American Airlines Theatre. Can it be long before London has not just the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery but, perhaps, the British Gas Theatre Royal, Drury Lane? (There's one way to save on utilities.)
What about individual giving in the UK? We don't yet seem to be at the $2bn mark when it comes to additions to art museums, though a comprehensive story on the Bloomberg news service this past week makes clear the extent to which individual and private giving is becoming ever more important in London amid worries that demands on government and even corporate funds will be further squeezed as the Olympics approach.
The article maintains, fascinatingly, that individual donors in the UK apparently are now giving some £100m more annually to the arts than the business world, with certain key players (Vivien Duffield, for one) seeing such activity as a mission of sorts to go in where government no longer dares to tread. Here, as in New York, the search is on for new money and fresh sources of funding, the hedge funders an obvious target simply because of the sums they represent. Where does this leave the government? No doubt quite happily off the hook, while the vagaries of the corporate world take their own back seat to one individual or another's personal passions - and the money to back them up.
It's often said that London is New York five years later, in which case the amounts now being talked about in Manhattan's museum world may find their London equivalent in different spheres. After all, one of those at the forefront of UK giving is City high-flyer John Studzinski, who just happens to be - you guessed it - American.
