Throwing money at famous people

Ian Moss has some insightful things to say about the misguided tendency of some funders to make large grants to already successful artists:

[I]n a world of six-hour news cycles, the idea that the average person (or even a highly-educated person) would somehow “realize the theater is important” because a heretofore unknown organization gave one person a nice sack of cash is absurd. People “realize the theater is important” because they have transformative experiences attending theater events or, more probably, because they participate in theater at a young age. Giving $200,000 to Tony Kushner accomplishes neither of these things.

There’s little doubt in my mind that, all things being equal, people with fewer resources generally find ways to stretch them further.  Fractured Atlas’s grant program makes micro-grants of just $250 to $1,000, but the recipients often do great things with the money that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.

What a large award (if it’s structured properly and doesn’t have too many strings attached) can do, however, is provide a safety net that allows an artist or organization to take big risks or make large bets that would otherwise not be possible.  But here, too, the more established/mature/flush the recipient is, the less likely such an award is to have this effect.