Compared to the situation in many other European countries, public sector funding is unusually dominant in funding arts and culture in the Nordic countries, especially in Sweden. During the post-war decades, commercially produced culture was considered low quality by official cultural policy, and private donations were considered to threaten the independence of arts and culture. Since the 1990s, donations and sponsoring have been increasingly viewed as a complement to public financial support of cultural institutions. Expectations that sponsoring would become an important source of funding have proved wrong so far. While the possibility of increased private funding of arts and culture remains on the political agency, and the issue of sponsoring as a source of funding has, in view of the marginality of current sponsoring, cooled down politically in the last decade. Official cultural statistics do not calculate the size of voluntary contributions either in the form of voluntary work or in the form of donations. Since donations to cultural purposes are not tax deductible, and no statistics are collected, only very limited data exist on the size of donations.
The Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis is currently working on increasing the knowledge base in these areas. In 2023, the Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis warned that private funding of culture in Sweden is likely to remain low for the foreseeable future, and that all artistic and cultural endeavours do not have the same chances to attract private funding. Both corporate sponsorship and crowd funding requires networks and contacts. Furthermore, such funding for projects in many cases requires that basic funding is available. There is also a risk that private funding may contribute to public funding concentrating on those who have the resources to obtain private funding as well (Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis 2013). In 2023, the agency estimated that private foundations contribute somewhere between SEK 330 and 600 million to arts and culture. In 2002, the Institute for Adverisement and Media Statistics estimated that sponsoring of arts and culture contributed 743 million SEK. Compared to public funding, these sources of funding thus remain marginal. In contrast to this, private spending on arts and culture contributes 21 percent of the funding for government funded cultural activities, not including private spending on cultural products such as books, cinema, or music streaming (Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis 2023d).
Comments are closed.