Looking back it’s easy to see that wealthy and powerful institutions, like churches and kingdoms, competed with one another. The history books are filled with tales of domination, war, victories, and defeats through the centuries. People nowadays tend to think that the competition between nations (and regions as well as towns) has largely disappeared and that their world is pacified.

There still is competition but it occurs through trade. This form of competition seems to concern businessmen, not nations (or regions or towns). People tend to consider commercial triumphs and defeats as extremely relative and temporal: one year this company or country wins, next year another. Trade seems to be a gentleman’s game, never to be confused with warfare. Appearances, however, are deceiving.
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Conventions serve a purpose. Collective experience helps establish the notion that the benefits of certain conventions outweigh their costs. Therefore, when behavior stems from such conventions, costs and benefits are taken for granted. They do not need to be pointed out or verified. For instance: ‘giving to art is good for banks and not giving is bad’. Moreover, this kind of conviction can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, producing its own benefits and penalties.

Does a bank undermine its standing in the industry by not collecting art? From the tenth floor, a bank’s behavior can be explained in terms of a fear of appearing contrary, or as particularly uninterested in culture. This could be detrimental because all banks must compete and try to lure qualified higher personnel.
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Nevertheless, the power of donors can be limited by obligations, as I intend to show in this and the next section. Donors often feel obliged to give. When the power of donors becomes limited, beneficiaries often gain some power in exchange. This means that beneficiaries can then apply pressure on the donor. If this pressure is persuasive, then transfers can evolve into something totally involuntary; they stop being gifts and turn into forced transfer like duties, taxes, or even bribes. This type of forced transfer is quite rare in the arts.

When gifts are exchanged between people of equal power, customs usually prescribe giving. People have a duty to give. In this context, it is worth noting that the largest percentage of private giving does not flow from rich to poor, but occurs between people from the same income brackets.
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Do gifts depend on power? Just as everyone’s purchasing power is not the same, there are also a variety of capacities to give or ‘powers to give’. Some people simply have more resources and thus effectively wield more power to influence the world around them through their buying and donating patterns than others have.

Trading and giving both presume the possession of the means or power to trade or give and therefore. Somebody, who has nothing, has nothing to give and therefore no means to influence the world. This does not imply that all donors in the art world are rich. On the contrary, sometimes donors do not need much to be able to give part of it away. For instance, poor volunteers and poor artists evidently have enough time to give some of it to art.
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There is extensive available literature regarding the gift. By formulating and then answering some questions about gift-giving in the arts, I try to apply some of this literature’s findings to the arts. I begin with some preliminary questions.

Who are the main beneficiaries of gifts to the arts? It seems apparent that art consumers and art producers both profit from these gifts. When an orchestra survives because of certain donations or subsidies, it’s considered a gift to those who can now continue to enjoy the concerts as well as to the musicians who can hold on to their jobs. But by calling it ‘gifts to the arts’ I also suggest that art itself can be a beneficiary. Thanks to particular gifts art can continue to flourish. As noted earlier, art itself cannot actually receive gifts; only people can. But in line with the way people think and speak metaphorically, these donations can also be considered gifts to art.
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