Who funds the arts and why we should care

This article is not talking about art as a whole, but "The Arts". I'll be playing a tiny violin for them.

why don't they do their own ice bucket challenge or something to raise their own funds if they're not happy with their current sponsors?

But, as the article rightfully notices, this is hardly new. It is a partnership that goes back for millenia. So for the author to claim that "the sheer weight of discontent suggests we are reaching a tipping point", it demands fairly convincing evidence. And to this effect, the author is tremendously underwhelming.

The simple truth is that the arts are realized to be important to society (although the specific reasons seem to differ depending on who you talk to) but are incredibly hard justify spending lots of money on "for art's sake". It's similar to the tension that exists in funding very basic science research. Yes, there is the outside possibility that we will generate work (artistic or scientific) that can contribute greatly in a pragmatic sense (i.e. a return on investment) but the great majority of endeavors will probably fall short.

The most convincing arguments for artistic funding are the ones that are being criticized: sending a specific message either indirectly (i.e. Company X supports the arts and is therefore a great humanistic organization) or directly (Company X commissions an artwork about subject Y). And this criticism does seem to stem from the fact, as mentioned in the article, that “Much avant-garde and contemporary art is actively hostile towards capitalism. If an artist who is critiquing corporate power is presented as part of this branded apparatus, the work is being betrayed quite fundamentally.”

But already, this statement suggests a solution. Have the artist retract their work. I suspect this doesn't happen more often both due to the legal complexities in consenting that your art may be shown at an institution, and the fact that it would mean a lot of artists actively shunning exposure on some of the most lucrative stages.

And so ultimately that's the crux of the argument: artists need to be funded to get exposure and survive. If we want them to be truly independent (again, from what? The article seems to cast it in the narrow sense of capitalist influence) then we need to find an alternative way of funding them. FURTHERMORE, and I think this is the truly difficult part, we would have to explicitly prohibit the commissioning of art by these agents.

The reality would be that we would have much less art than we do now, and existing art would be harder to see, too. For example, insurance for masterpieces isn't cheap. That money has to come from somewhere. And if so, you just have a situation where corporations don't commission art - they just ensure it can be displayed.

Lastly, though, and this is what the real logical flaw of the author is, does art truly depend on context? I know that this is the classic post-modern argument, but the emotions that we feel when seeing art are probably quite unique to us. They might be the message the artist is trying to convey, or they may not. Either way, even if the capitalist system wants me to interpret an artwork in a certain way, it doesn't necessarily mean that I will.