Scholarships and prizes are instruments of individual support for artists, which are awarded by public authorities at municipal, state and federal level as well as by private and civil society organisations.
The web portal Kulturpreise Online provides information on cultural funding, especially for individual support for artists in the form of prizes and scholarships.
Culture and art awards are a particularly important funding instrument that has grown in scope and importance in recent decades. In 1978, the Handbook of Cultural Prizes (Handbuch der Kulturpreise) listed 776 prizes and scholarships; by 1985 the number had risen to 1,329; in 1994 the figure was just under 2,000 entries; in 2000 there were 2,400 prizes with 3,100 price units. In the current version (as of April 2019) 2,661 main prize entries with 4,403 price units were listed. Of these 2,661 main prize entries, 405 were in the field of literature, followed by interdisciplinary prizes (391), visual arts (364), music (301), media and journalism (301), film (181), design / photography / arts and crafts (140), architecture / heritage conservation (124), performing arts (120) and other prizes (334). Compared to the prize landscape in 2000, the number of prices increased most in percentage terms in the areas of “other cultural prices”, media and journalism, film, visual arts, architecture and the preservation of historical monuments, whereas the areas of music and performing arts recorded a decrease in prizes.[1]
Some prizes at federal level are mentioned
here as examples: German Film Prize (since 1951, formerly: Federal Film Prize),
Cultural Education Prize (since 2009), German Computer Game Prize (since 2009),
German Music Author Prize (since 2009), Applause – Award for venues with
outstanding live music programmes (since 2013), Culture Opens Worlds (since
2015), Federal Theatre Prize (since 2015), German Bookstore Prize (since 2015),
German Publishing Prize (since 2019). There are also numerous prizes and
scholarships at state and local government level.
[1] Wiesand, Andreas (2019): Entwicklung der Kultur- und Literaturpreise seit 1978.
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