The Anxiety of Asking. Between selling art and requesting support.

door: Marianna Stefanitsi

Artists and cultural institutions today must navigate a challenging funding landscape and are expected to generate income through selling while at the same time cultivating private support. So, how can a fair price for art be balanced with the need to request donations to survive professionally? This tension inevitably raises questions about legitimacy, professional dignity, artistic autonomy and the sustainability of artistic practice. In her 2024 article “The Anxiety of Asking: Entrepreneurial and Patronage Practices in the Creative Sector,” Prof. Dr. Helleke van den Braber analyses this dilemma. She distinguishes between market and gift transactions and explores how reciprocity shapes patronage relationships. 

Van den Braber opens with the example of Dutch visual artist Tinkebell. In 2016, Tinkebell published a piece in Trouw describing the economic reality of her art practice. Making art requires money, while income from art sales remains unstable, even when living modestly without owning a house or going on vacation. What allowed her to continue creating was the support of a private patron who functioned as a financial safety net, which Tinkebell described as a luxury. For Van den Braber, this story crystallises a structural tension in which artists must master not only the art of selling, but also the art of asking. 

This dual expectation has been reinforced by Dutch and European cultural policy. In 2010, Dutch State Secretary Halbe Zijlstra called for a stronger entrepreneurial orientation in the cultural sector alongside the development of a “culture of giving.” Since then, artists and organisations have been required to operate within both market exchange and gift exchange. Yet these approaches bring to the surface layered sentiments and practices. On the one hand, selling art relies on set prices and measurable transactions, where the exchange is explicit. On the other hand, the culture of asking operates within the sphere of the gift, where reciprocity is less visible, obligations remain implicit, and value cannot be calculated precisely. This ambiguity, which Van den Braber identifies, makes asking so uncomfortable. 

Creatives seeking donations often hesitate to emphasise their financial needs explicitly, as foregrounding vulnerability risks undermining their professional authenticity. As a second dilemma, when artists ask for support, they need to frame this request as a gift, which only feels like a gift if it does not appear calculated. Patronage in this view is not simply about financial support. In this process, donors provide economic and social capital, such as money, connections and reputation, and institutions and artists, in turn, offer cultural capital, which means access and proximity to artistic processes and sometimes even a degree of influence. Beyond these tangible and semi-tangible exchanges lies something more subtle, which Van den Braber calls narrative meaning. By supporting art, patrons position themselves as contributors to cultural value and artistic mastery. The relationship revolves around the artwork which mediates and justifies this exchange. 

Overall, maintaining such reciprocity, which is crucial as Van den Braber mentions, is demanding and requires emotional labour, tact and clear boundaries. Artists must protect their artistic autonomy while remaining open to support and must articulate the value of their work without reducing it to a market price. The more the gift relationship looks less like a market transaction, the more successful the gift relationship becomes. This delicate negotiation produces what Van den Braber calls the anxiety of asking. 

Why is understanding this discomfort so important for the cultural field? Because, as Van den Braber argues, the anxiety of asking is not merely a technical fundraising challenge. It reflects deeper structural tensions within contemporary artistic production, between artistic integrity and economic necessity. Recognising this complexity does not dissolve the tension but it allows artists, institutions and policymakers to approach patronage more consciously and to better understand the demanding interplay that defines arts sustainability today. 

Want to know more? You can find the full article “The anxiety of asking. Entrepreneurial and patronage practices in the creative sector” (2024) by Prof. Dr. Helleke van den Braber here.