Starting on a large scale towards the end of the 1960s in the United States and expanding rapidly ever since, corporate funding has spread during the last five years to Britain and the Continent. Ambitious exhibition programs that could not be financed through traditional sources led museums to turn to corporations for support. The larger, more lavishly appointed these shows and their catalogues became, however, the more glamour the audiences began to expect.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.

Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive.

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The first impression and a natural one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now known.

You know', I said, 'I have come to dislike museums.’ 'Why is that?’, she asked. 'It is where art comes to die.

We went from losses to goods seized by creditors, while continuing to organize surrealist or abstract exhibitions…

Since the industrial revolution, we have been plagued with periodic recessions and depressions, described as the "lows" of the business cycle. It should be made perfectly clear that these recessions, unlike famines, are not Acts of God, but simply attributable to the folly and inflexibility of man.

You can't sell anything to the museum nowadays. If one presents something now, one is partly rejected because they have no money in cash. Yes Friend, that's how things are going.. .It's going very bad here with the old arts in The Hague., I hardly hear of anything. How are things going in Rotterdam? I believe that also there is not much moving. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)

Over the last few decades of colonialism, colonial possessions served capitalism as a safety valve in times of crisis. The first major occasion when this was displayed was during the great economic depression of 1929–34. During that period, forced labor was increased in Africa and the prices paid to Africans for their crops were reduced. Workers were paid less and imported goods cost a great deal more. That was a time when workers in the metropolitan countries also suffered terribly; but the colonialists did the best they could to transfer the burdens of the depression away from Europe and on to the colonies.

when money becomes more of a god, do art

Economic development can bring prosperity but it can also be a drag to arts and culture.

After 1929 it was the sturdy middle classes, and not just the lumpen proletariat, who were down and out. It was not all that unfashionable or disreputable to be bankrupt. By the last Hoover years, the states and localities had run out of money for relief. In middle-class neighborhoods like mine, you constantly had children at the door, asking by mouth or with a note for a dime, a quarter, or a potato: saying, in a believable fashion, we are starving.