the arts are not well funded when times are lean....in California...on many levels....times are lean.
Yet Cali has the most overheated real estate market in the country.
The problem isn't a shortage of money. I think that the real problem, at least in terms of the sort of artwork you hang on walls, is that for the last fifty to seventy-five years, the art world became pretentious and self-indulgent, deliberately scorning the patrons. You can't produce garbage, hang it on the walls, tell everyone how wonderful it is, and that they're idiots if they disagree. If they had set out deliberately to destroy the whole concept of art (and some did, like the guy who hung the urinal on the wall), they couldn't have succeeded any more thoroughly. Ordinary people don't trust art or artists, and I don't blame them a bit.
I have a favorite fantasy: someday, all of the museum curators are going to have a GIANT garage sale of 20th century garbage-- they'll call it the "What Were We Thinking?" sale. Then they'll take the proceeds from the sale, all $200 or so of it, and maybe buy a little something beautiful.