Arts Funding, an Oily Business

From the guardian.co.uk: In the wake of the BP and their Tate sponsorship, Britain's leading cultural figures talk about corporate sponsorship of the arts.

And from the Telegraph.co.uk:

Great art has always been involved with great fortunes: it was only a temporary distortion of history, a hangover from the Romantic idea that artists need be poor and tormented, that insisted art must be uncontaminated by trade. Patronage may well be a non-negotiable part of artistic activity. For a while, this principle was blurred when the interventionist
economist J M Keynes helped found the Arts Council after the Second World War. Keynes simply made the state a patron. Do the oily protesters advocate refusal of the Arts Council's "government" money supporting the Tate because the same government money funded an illegal war in Iraq and a tragic war in Afghanistan? Of course they don't.