The article presents a fundamentally new approach to the financial provision of the state task to art organizations, an alternative to practice of standardization individual elements of labor costs and non-wage costs. The authors offer the method of determination of socially reasonable volume of subsidies to producers of cultural goods on the basis of measurement of deficiency of their income taking into account the objective economic laws defining conditions of cultural activity and the social norms established by the state.
The principal result of the research is theoretical and methodological approbation of the new approach and empirical testing of the created methodology. The article presents the outcome of testing the methodology for determining budget subsidies through the example of 62 subjects of the Russian Federation and in Russia as a whole. Also it examines the example of separate art organizations on the basis of a specially created database characterizing the activities of theaters, concert organizations and museums in the period 2005–2015.
The new approach and the study, carried out in accordance with it, have made it possible to quantitatively show that even at a relatively low level of wages in art organizations, the budget subsidies allocated were insufficient and predetermined the recent processes of commercialization of art, accompanied by superinflationary dynamics of prices for cultural goods.