2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Do you know a really rich person? [View all]marions ghost
(19,841 posts)Museums and local arts orgs ARE available to the public generally. And if the rich didn't fund them, nobody would, these days. So I'm not sure that is such a bad thing.
Certainly bigtime art buying and support is a tax write-off for the rich. They can buy some art work and if it goes to a museum right away, they get big tax benefits. So it's a trickle down thing. When the rich want to create a home for their collection, they fund a museum. When the rich fund art-related venues, they can skew what types of art are shown, reflecting only the values of the Plutocracy. But since there is so little public funding of the arts now, the rich are seen as heroes in this--saviors and guardians of tangible cultural capital. They also fund music and performance arts.
So I'm ambivalent about this. But with a country where there is so much need in other directions, and people don't even have access to health care, it is hard to argue for the arts to get public funds--we might have to dip into the vast resources flowing to the military industrial sector to do that.