Also, artists need time to develop. Sturgeon's law isn't just for artists you know. Every artist knows that you generally have to create a lot of crap to get good. So when people give out about crap art, they're really just telling on themselves: "I don't create".
Finally, for fun, try comparing fossil fuel subsidies to artist subsidies some time. "But we need fossil fuel" - try going a week without any art; no music, no movies, no games.
We've been making art for a really long time. We've been smearing colors onto surfaces for at least tens of thousands of years, and carving patterns into rocks and shells for at least hundreds of thousands of years.
Everywhere you find human communities, you find some kind of art. We must need it for something. If we didn't then it wouldn't be so ubiquitous.