Why more arts funding? So asks Giles Auty: “Hurling money at art has, of course, been a popular pastime in Western countries for as long as I can remember. It is the process, in fact, once memorably described to me by an English painter, Bryan Wynter, as ‘paying for van Gogh’s ear’. No other brief description encapsulates so wonderfully the notion that guilt-ridden rich societies ought to discharge a fiscal and moral debt to a group of mysterious people they may have unconsciously wronged or ignored.”