In the United Kingdom, and since the late 20th century, both the state and private sponsors have been keen to support the commissioning of increasingly monumental, spectacular, mixed-media artworks, which have been instrumentalised either for their capacity to garner publicity, to boost regeneration, or for national branding and aggrandizement. More and more installations or interventions have required that production funds be invested ahead of the creation of the work rather than down the line, when it enters the market. Many new parameters have accompanied these new practices and esthetic changes: National Lottery money, the rise of foundations, and new mixed-economy structures which are able to harness both the stability of state funding and the seduction of art for private philanthropy. The diversion by the Thatcher government of state funding distributed by the Arts Council towards matching schemes and the encouragement of business sponsorship had transformed the national art ecosystem in the early 1980s. Later, the introduction of targets and a new need for accountability in part explained why, over time, the Arts Council gradually withdrew from funding individual artists in favour of funding organisations and cultural infrastructures which had the resources and staff to provide feedback on their actions and thorough self-assessments. In a fraught cultural context – the punitive cuts of the Thatcher and later the coalition governments, but also the political agenda of the Blair government’s focus on the bountiful creative industries – the emergence of private charities aiming at supporting art and public engagement with culture appears, almost paradoxically, as a tory dream of public disinvestment. I wish to show that the independent and semi-independent public art commissioning agencies, often charities, which have emerged in the UK since the 1980s (The Public Art Development Trust, The Basement Group, Projects UK, Locus+, Outset, Artangel, Situations, Artichoke, etc.) have navigated the waters of changing national cultural policies to produce projects through commissions, competitions and deals brokered with developers by relying neither completely on the state nor completely on the market. In doing so, they became emancipated from their American models and have become central to the recent developments in British artistic creation.