Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Leo Tostoy, Feodor Dostoyevskii, James Joyce and many other great writers did not get a cent in public funding for their writing. I did. I don't have a smidgin of the talent they had. However, I live in a different era.

I wrote some fiction. After it was published I noted that it had been "assisted by grants from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts and the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the Federal Government arts funding and advisory body."

I took the money, but my writing is my own ego trip. I see no reason for taxpayers to support it.

One of the prime functions of the public intellectual or the artist is to point out the foibles and flaws of our society - to throw a light on what those in power want hidden. There should be nothing inhibiting that criticism. Public funding has the power to do that. When one gets money to do something one will want to appeal to those who lay out the money.

Once upon a time, those who had income to spare, & leisure time to spend supported the arts, that they found worthy of that support.

The better artists flourished, others got a job.

Today, those who don't have income to spare, or leisure time to enjoy, are forced to support the arts, through their taxes, regardless of whether those arts are worthy of any support.

The better artists flourish, & the others lobby for more tax payer money. They should get a job, if they can not support themselves with their "art".

I don't know if the author's definition of 'the arts' includes writing, but phrases like:

"The arts are where cutting-edge conversations about the nature of humanity are likely to occur.."

"A comparatively minimal level of support is needed to significantly broaden the career options available to artists, to ensure that their potential is realised."

suggest that she has already mastered the art of bureaucratic double-speak.

What does 'comparatively minimal' mean, I wonder? And what exactly is a 'cutting-edge conversation'? It sounds extremely painful. But the gist of the message is clear: give us more of your money, please, so we can go on doing the things we enjoy at your expense.

Will we soon reach the point, I wonder, when we realise that we already have enough good films, play scripts, music, literature, paintings and sculpture to keep us all entertained for the rest of our lives, if we were only allowed access to them? I would happily barter all the forthcoming books from Australian novelists for access to material written here and overseas in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hasbeen, that same logic surely applies to sport! I resent paying for the Olympics, for instance, as the whole saturnalia is nothing but economic elitism and nationalistic grandstanding.
Yet I don't see the institutionalisation of "the arts" as much different, especially considering that "the ideology of aestheticism has been roundly discredited for decades.
Even if we choose to defend art for art's sake, government patronage and concomitant career development strategies is hardly conducive to "inspiration"--a discredited illusion. Indeed I don't see how commodified art can have artistic or aesthetic integrity.
We live, intellectually, in an anti-aesthetic era (a fact modern philistines are oblivious of) whereby cultural reform is ostensibly the raison d'etra of the arts; but that's just theory, observed mainly in the breach. The so-called "High" arts surely don't, and have never, even made a pretence of fomenting for social reform.
The following quote says it all:
<In addition to the intrinsic cultural value [which is what?], the arts play an important institutional role [bloody oath!]. They define life in a civilised society [bullsh!t], help build intellectual capacity [lol], aid social cohesion [and exclusion], and are the bedrock of increasingly significant creative industries [Adorno's "culture industry"].>

An utterly hegemonic (indeed offensive) definition of the arts that would have Tolstoy or Shaw or Brecht furiously railing from the stalls.
Indeed, I don't even believe in the ideology of cultural reform, as it only makes our rotten system stronger, by introducing comforting illusions of an ethically progressive state. The arts, as davidf says, should "point out the foibles and flaws of our society", but this unfortunately tends to act like polly-filler. Our culture is beyond redemption and the arts should be exposing its fundamental iniquity, and the need for transformation rather than reform. I would rather see all funding of the arts cancelled, even funding of Arts degrees; only then might art arise to the political/ethical 'and' aesthetic stature it's attained in the past.
Paradoxically, Wilde's "aestheticism" was infinitely more political than today's culturalism. The "High" arts are as spontaneous as a North Korean military parade.

Without funding for the arts and sport our society would become a very functional and dull place indeed. Stimulating the creative urge is essential to prevent us all becoming automatons who do nothing except work, sleep and watch mass-produced crap TV programs.

I see those who complain at this funding to be short-sighted and quite insular in their views. I am no soccer fan, but I see how many people are enjoying the world cup and I think it's great that they get so much joy out of it. Similarly I am no painter, but I know so many people who get a lot of joy out of painting, or writing, or dancing, either through watching it or participating in that activity. There are huge numbers of these people, and I see no value in reducing their access to this recreation. It would simply be churlish and mean.

I would rather that my taxes were used for funding arts and sport than to fund MP's expenses, private schools and many other unworthy causes.