Andy Warhol once asked why people think artists are special. After all, he said, it is just another job. During this year there will be plenty of visitors to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury demanding special exemption from the recession. The bankers, the postal office workers, the car manufacturers have all put in a claim. But, with public debt expected to reach £118 billion next year, every Whitehall department will sense a chill wind. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport will also feel the full force of the most eloquent and best-connected lobby in the country: the artists who think that artists are special.

The arts have had a good decade, at least measured by their success in successive spending reviews. Funding has doubled in a decade. Much of this money has been spent well. More people - 42 million - visited museums in Britain last year than ever before. The policy of free entry has been a great success. Exhibitions are attracting a wider range of people than was once the case, proving Larkin's point that there are many who, faced with something uplifting, will surprise a hunger in themselves to be more serious.

Ever since Matthew Arnold, it has always been easy to find a critic to say that culture could be either excellent or popular but not both. That has not been the experience of the past decade. The Times has made Neil MacGregor its first Briton of the Year for his work at the British Museum. British theatre too has been through a wonderful decade, both in London and in the regions, where the box office has never been so busy.

In the process, a viable and durable funding model for the arts has emerged. Public funding is combined with private enterprise, subsidy and the box office. The Arts Council operates as an arm's-length body so the State is placed in the position of doing what it has historically done well - funding - and not what it has historically done very badly - control. Then ingenious arts entrepreneurs are let loose to do their best.

The beauty of this model is that public subsidy permits risk taking and generates a return. The success of Alan Bennett's The History Boys is a good example. Its journey on an international tour and into the West End was based on its time at the National Theatre, but not funded by it. That has not prevented earnings in excess of £1 million going back to the National Theatre.

These great achievements have come in spite of, rather than because of, the Government's attitude to the arts. Ministers have habitually embraced the arts purely for their instrumental functions - the jobs, the education, the help that they provide to troubled children.

The best appeal to the Gradgrindian hearts of ministers might be to emphasise the pivotal economic importance of what the Government never misses an opportunity to call “the creative industries”, which now account for 7 per cent of the national economy.

But even that case cannot wish away reality. It is true that the DCMS budget is tiny and small cuts have big effects. But money is short and the arts will have to make do with less. The DCMS is already trying, in vain so far, to contain Olympics inflation. But there is no need for despair. The years of plenty have had plenty of turkeys funded as well as classics. Arthur Miller once said that good writing is like an organism - nothing is wasted. The same applies to arts funding.