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Amid ongoing funding cuts, Dale Berning Sawa looks at what UK arts organisations can learn from their counterparts in the US.

When the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Rabkin Foundation last month she did not head to the bank. It came with a $50,000 prize, but the broadsheet’s ethics guidelines instruct staff faced with such a conflict of interest to decline. Smith gave it all away. And the recipient of that gift — Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund — puts the spotlight on a giant in American cultural philanthropy and the potential of the US philanthropic system.
Gund, who comes from a banking dynasty in Cleveland, Ohio, is a Manhattan institution, a vestige of old-world glamour, art-world clout and eye-opening generosity. Two years ago she sold Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 canvas Masterpiece for $165 million. She used the proceeds to set up the Art for Justice Fund, whose remit is to help to reduce the high prison numbers in the US via the arts. She has been donating, chairing, funding and otherwise serving in the non-profit arts and museum sectors, among others, for nearly half a century. She has accepted presidential medals and sat on government councils, and The New York Times last year dubbed her, aged 81, the homecoming queen of the philanthropy world.
Do a little digging into the board of any US city’s philharmonic orchestra, say, or any state’s museum of modern art and you’ll find that Gund is not alone...Keep reading on The Times