Shifting cultural policy landscapes in the USA: What role for philanthropic foundations?

In the USA, the Culture Wars of the late 1980s represented a period of policy upheaval that largely ended the post-war cultural policy consensus. Since then, the arts have witnessed the fading significance of the National Endowment of the Arts and growing strains of the carefully nurtured nonprofit arts infrastructure, on the one hand; and the rise of a cacophony of new and more diffused cultural policy interests and objectives, on the other. Unfortunately, a new policy paradigm has yet to emerge. Utilizing the Foundation Center arts funding data, this paper seeks to explore how foundations have responded to the shifting cultural policy landscapes of the last three decades, and what roles foundations appear to pursue while navigating the new policy terrain.