This essay in The Culture We Deserve is about how the funding for art has come to be a cause of the problems surrounding the purity and sensibility of art.#

Jacques points out that art was not a special "thing", it was just something inherent in everything that was produced by the only organizations there were: the church and the state.#

For more than two thousand years, then, church and state-often indistinguishable from each other-were for the arts both impresario and purchaser. They were at times seconded by the wealthy who wanted pieces of art for private use, whether religious or secular, this demand being fulfilled by their social inferiors. To put it another way, all the arts were regarded as practical arts, produced for purposes universally understood. A new style of architecture was not so much an aesthetic innovation as a new feat of engineering.

A notable feature of this outlook and this mode of subsidy is that nobody was likely to enter protests. No middle-class Egyptian trader in figs was heard to say, "To my mind, the pyramid of Cheops is much too squat for beauty." When one of the spires of Chartres cathedral was rebuilt after a fire, its being made in a totally different style from the remaining spire elicited no editorial in the Chartres Evening Trumpet. There was no newspaper to assail the decision of the ecclesiastical authorities, no public opinion gathering to petition the mayor. The townsmen had few if any conscious aesthetic ideas; rather, they were proud to have a spire in the latest fashion, with a graceful, fretted outline. [pg. 25]

Another point of the past is when the artist as we know it finally emerged, with the emergence of nation-states and the decaying of old institutions.#

[...] Ad the decay of serfdom and of guilds, and you set the stage for the solitary artist, a new social species, who becomes an egotistical wanderer in search of a patron.

[...] The artists attach themselves to princes, to popes, to wealthy bourgeois patrons no longer bound by old ideas of just price. We begin to know artists by name, and learn of their tribulations, as we do not-or rarely-know the names and lives of medieval artists. [pg. 26]

The conflict between art and society "that has characterized the last 150 years" was rooted in the early days of egotistical art and artists.#

Two contrary movements made this conflict inevitable and permanent. One was the glorification of art as the highest spiritual expression of man's life on earth. The artist-genius thereby became a seer and a prophet. He knew and proclaimed the ultimate truths that condemned the materialism of everyday life; he denounced the world, flouted it rules of behavior, and also foretold the march of culture, because he was leading it-whence the term avant-garde. This view of society was confirmed by the hostile response of his contemporaries. They were the philistines, born enemies of everything fine and noble; for they were part of the opposite movement of the century, utilitarian, bent on material progress and social stability. War between the two was declared by the very act of creating unconventional art; no peace was possible, because the aims of the two sides were irreconcilable. It was the prophet and the saint against the compact majority of sinners. The contempt automatically attached today to the term bourgeois has its sources and its expression in the arts of the nineteenth century. [pg. 31]

Jacques writes that after World War I, art became the universal escape from the horrors of the world, and with this growth of observers it responded in a strange way.#

By 1920 art as such was the concern or pastime of a wider public than ever before, and, no matter how weird its latest forms, was accepted without protest. The past had shown that the public was always wrong, so wisdom and snobbery alike dictated humble submission to whatever came. For these philistines in reverse gear everything in a gallery or a book or on the stage was "interesting." It was experimental, and who would dare to challenge an experiment? Authority had passed from the customer-patron to the supplier-artist. [pg. 32]

In essence, the expansion of the audience of art turned it into a de facto religion...#

Colleges and universities created art departments, built theatres, captured revolving poets, stationary stage directors, and composers-in-residence; they turned the glee club into a chorus and orchestra, set up film units, attached a string quartet to the faculty-in short, became recruits of the world-wide sect of art-as-religion. Its influences after one generation could be read in the manifesto of the rioting students of Chicago in 1968; two of their demands were: the abolition of money and every man or woman an artist. [pg. 33]

Jacques concludes with the point that the "golden age" of art support never really was and that the "curse" of art is intrinsic..#

No earlier scheme, as we saw, has proved satisfactory either. And to redesign ours would mean a series of impossibilities that can summed up as deliberate discouragement: of the young artistic impulse, of the mature desire for a public career, of the competitive scramble t the great centers. It seems as if high art were from the beginning under a curse that grows more bitter as civilization spreads ever wide the demand for a good that it produces all too abundantly. [pg. 36]