The Royal Academy's inability to find a corporate sponsor for its forthcoming Andrea Palladio exhibition could well prove less an indicator of current fiscal problems than a sign that the show is perceived as rather staid.

What business trying to push its radical go-ahead message wants to project a strict image of neo-Classical convention?

No wonder GlaxoSmithKline has put its money into the trendy GSK Contemporary in the RA's rather cooler Burlington Gardens outpost.

The relationship between a curatorial programme and corporate sponsorship is characteristically delicate.

At worst, it forges the sort of unholy alliance that puts safely fashionable trends and blockbusting spectaculars over risk-taking inquiry and serious scholarship.

And, of course, the sponsors are often wrong. The academy, after all, couldn't find a sponsor for its landmark Brit-art Sensation show.

Still, ever since the Eighties, when Thatcherite policies starting hacking away at public funding for culture, the business sponsor has played an enormously important role. And millions have benefited.

Think of all those wonderfully affordable £10 Travelex tickets to the National Theatre, for instance, or the tremendous annual drama of the Unilever sponsored Tate Turbine Hall installation or the dozens of artistic careers launched by the ICA's Becks Futures prize — some of them even promoted on the custom-designed labels of the bottle.

Of course there can be problems — and not just for curators who find themselves bullied by brand-conscious businessmen. Sponsors can find themselves backing a show whose content whips up a potentially damaging scandal. But on balance, thinking of anything from the free glass of Moet at the launch party to the music at the Sage Gateshead (the Norman Foster designed concert hall whose title was bought up by the software group that now pays for it) the arts have benefited greatly from corporate sponsorship.

Maybe the arts should now be thinking of supporting our failing corporations. How about the Hirst Bank of Scotland? Your money would probably be safe in that.

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