From what I can tell, there's 4-5 distinct "fellowship" circuits -- public policy circles, "art" and literary residencies, journalistic sabbatical circuit (knight etc), and the youngest, the internet one (mozilla etc, now including Web3 treasury sources)
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What's common to all of them is, unless you know someone at the top who is able to evaluate idiosyncratic apps personally, you *have* to be producing in a sort of captive market of cultural production, in a particular format (trad media publishing, books, policy papers, acad)
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Lots of MFA-lit type fiction novelists seem to write books specifically for that very particular racket (sorry, but MFA lit *is* a racket) via a series of fellowships 🧐... museum-anchored art is similar, but imo less of a racket and with more actually interesting output
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"Aging Creator Dreams of String of Fellowships to Ride to Retirement in Sinecureland" would be a very fun satire to write 🤣
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Well, no rest for the illegible wicked. Must hustle our way to the grave.
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Would be nice if more institutional money had the tolerance for illegibility that berggruen does...
Most of these places, incidentally, are kinda 75-80% reserved for academics on sabbatical and/or revolving door influentials from adjacent institutions like fed govt btw.
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So only about 20-25% at best is even available for genpop wildcard types... you're competing with tenured academics and fresh PhDs in a postdoc holding pattern for the most part
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And the barrier to entry is actually higher. I'm not actually an exception. I didn't get the fellowship entirely on the strength of shitposts. It was a case of "we want you for your blogging etc, but it's your PhD that will actually allow us to get you past the gatekeepers"
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It is almost depressing how much of a passport my PhD has been into all sorts of places where the substance of it was entirely irrelevant. It's the mere fact that I have one. Kinda like a security clearance. Feel bad for more talented/deserving people without this passport.
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