&gt; The reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was garbage as art.<p>Or, more generally, any potential value of it is subjective, and evaluations of merit aren&#x27;t actually taking even that into account.<p>Offensiveness doesn&#x27;t seem even remotely relevant; some people may enjoy works that others find offensive.  On the other hand, foring others to involuntarily fund &quot;art&quot; without using any measure of the value provided either to the people viewing it or to the people funding it (and utterly disconnecting those two groups) seems ridiculous, and leads to problems like this.  And then you get into definitions of &quot;art&quot;, and criteria for what should and shouldn&#x27;t get funded.<p>With all the myriad ways of connecting with potentially interested audiences today, much of the rationale for speculatively funding art no longer exists.  If you make something people find worthwhile, you don&#x27;t need public support, and if you&#x27;re not, you shouldn&#x27;t receive public support.  Produce samples, get people interested, find patrons (or customers, or both), build larger projects, repeat.  And if you want to work on something that nobody else cares about enough to fund (or that you don&#x27;t care about seeking funding for, for any number of reasons), that&#x27;s called a &quot;hobby&quot;.<p>That <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> mean that &quot;culture&quot; devolves into exclusively &quot;pop culture&quot;.  It doesn&#x27;t take a large number of interested people to provide a substantial amount of funding; a very small amount of money from a thousand people can fund a career for one.  So this certainly doesn&#x27;t mean that only the makers of mass-market popular culture can get funding; quite the contrary.<p>Defining &quot;art&quot;, or setting criteria for receiving funding, then becomes irrelevant for anyone other than philosophers or art critics.  If people like something and want to support it, they can.