Designed for success or failure: Differences in funding and rejection in the space of applications to the Danish Art Foundation among craftsmen and designers

Abstract

Craft and design are art forms that teeter on the boundary of being considered art. Because of this, these mediums are an ideal case to examine how the Danish Art Foundation funds these arts and what this says about the distinction of the arts in a Danish context. This article analyses 1898 full-text applications for funding - both the ones that have been awarded funding and the ones that have been rejected - of craftsmen and designers from a five-year range. The applications are analysed with hierarchical Stochastic Block Modelling and Class Specific Correspondence Analysis to reduce the complexity of the data. Using these methods, the structures of both the overall meta-field and the discipline-specific subfields become apparent, and so do the different degrees of homologies and heterologies between subfields and the meta-field and the field of art. Exemplified by four subfields, we identify four different types of homology/heterology: a full homology, a secondary homology, a heterologous artistic pole, and a full heterology. That some subfields of craft and design are homologous to the field of art while others are heterologous exemplifies the process of artification from an institutional perspective. The criteria for being considered artistic varies from subfield to subfield, with some having homologous structures to the art field, while others show a clear heterologous structure, highlighting that subfields can be autonomous from a common meta-field. Some subfields are, however, neither fully homologous nor heterologous but exhibit a mix of both logics. This article hopes to add to the discussion of methods for determining field autonomy and what fields can be autonomous from.