The Art Fund (formerly the National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. The Fund relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery.
Since its foundation in 1903 the Fund has been involved in the acquisition of over 860,000 works of art of every kind, including many of the most famous objects in British public collections, such as Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, Picasso's Weeping Woman in the Tate collection, the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the medieval Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant in the British Museum.
The original idea for an arts charity can be traced to a lecture given by John Ruskin in 1857 when he called for the establishment of a "great society" to save works of art for public collections and "watch over" them.
Stringed puppets dancing,
Drawing flies to the stench
Flesh impaled with wires
Sick, amusing, painful play
Imagination, evisceration
A morbid show
With blood on the wall
Hear people’s call
Chant and applaud
Caged in mocked misery
And audience with bleeding taste
Pulling strings, open sores
Come in,
Come in and catch the art
Barbed wire, embracing like fire
Deforming architecture
Endless desires, clawing pyre
Like a living dissection
Closing ecstasy, a fevered burning plague
Temptations lost control,
Rips apart the victims whole
Artistic patterns remain
Like a puzzle in its chaos start