TO FILL FUNDING VOID, ARTS GROUPS TURN TO CORPORATIONS

Corporate sponsorships have been common in sports and other industries for years and lately have become widespread in the arts, writes Bob Keyes in the Portland Press-Herald. Nationally, corporate sponsorships for the arts totaled nearly 600 million dollars in 2001, according to the Harvard Business Review, while the National Endowment for the Arts operated on a budget of just over 100 million dollars the same year—a disparity in funding levels that illustrates arts groups’ growing dependence on corporate partnerships.