7. Nordic public funding for independent arts and culture: a ...

The Norwegian Culture Fund was established in 1964 and has since been the perhaps single most important source of funding for contemporary Norwegian arts and culture production and dissemination (cf. Berge 2022). The fund is administered by Arts Council Norway, an arm’s length body that in 2022 distributed a total of 44 grant schemes, within the seven areas of music, literature, performing arts, visual arts, journals and criticism, multidisciplinary projects and cultural heritage. As outlined [...] in Table 6.4, in 2022, The Norwegian Culture Fund funded 3,409 projects with funds totalling €88.9 million. The field of music constitutes the largest recipient. Also, the performing arts field is a large recipient. That means that the classic performing arts receive an impressive 75% of the funding, underscoring the traditionally strong position of these art forms in the project-based economy in Norwegian cultural policy. [...] The analysis includes public subsidy systems for arts and culture at state, county and municipality levels of government in Norway, and includes funding schemes for domestic and international art projects. The analyses will focus on grants given in 2022, since this is the year from which detailed data from the Nordic funders are available (see chapter 2). All data on the domestic funding is tapped from publicly available sources, mainly Statistics Norway, Arts Council Norway and Stikk.no.