In 1880 the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun wrote the first psychology-driven novel, Hunger. In it an unpublished writer gets himself arrested to have a place to sleep for the night. Franz Kafka wrote A Hunger Artist in 1924 about a man who is world-famous for his public performances of fasting. Henri Murger wrote about four starving artists in Scènes de la Vie de Bohème - immortalised in Puccini's opera La Bohème. Poor Mimi - “your tiny hand is frozen”.

In these forthcoming hard times, these could prove examples to us all. Starving artist syndrome is the lot of those obsessives among us for whom the desire and drive to devote ourselves to creative expression outstrips our income.

With the recession and credit crunch licking at our boots and high heels, many more artists will be joining the ranks of the starving or cash-poor, while every penny goes on paint, canvas, paper, pen, music sheets, strings, rosin, film or video. Where they can be found, odd jobs will be taken to supplement the art habit. For art is a powerful and intoxicating addiction to creativity. No artist ever really takes a day off. To create something that wasn't there before, to make a slice of the imaginary real and to get lost in the focused intensity of it may well be the ultimate joy.

As someone who has always been at the service of art whether my habit was easily supportable or not, I feel qualified to comment on the question of whether money makes an artist's art better or whether it is a kind of jeopardy to the purity of one's vision. For as soon as money gets in there, expectations are created and demands on the artist's product become more pressurised. Most artists consider it their duty to resist such pressure.

But there's no question that patronage is a blessing. Nothing is going to be done as long as an artist is without funds entirely. The poet T.S. Eliot was a banker. The poet William Carlos Williams moonlighted as an obstetrician, delivering babies while creating that immortal line about the red wheelbarrow. (“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.”) It's hard to remember now that Turner, whose last words were “the sun is God”, had many detractors in his day. His first painting to sell was bought for £500 by a wealthy private collector who expressed disappointment in its “indistinctness”. (“Indistinctness,” Turner replied, “"is my fault.”) He did illustrations for travel guides to get by.

It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. The comforts of stability may never belong to the person who is absorbed in an internal struggle to bring forth something ineffable, something beyond words but true nonetheless. Damien Hirst is entitled to be rewarded for having the self-esteem to ask overblown prices for his stuffed sharks or slices of cow. But there comes a point at which the amount of money thrown at this or that flavour of the year, rewarding celebrity image over the power of artistic expression, can seem a little out of balance, as well as encouraging all sorts of childish behaviour. For artists are typically prolonging the magic and selfish delights of childhood. The world is better for it, of course.

Michelangelo was barely tolerated in his own time, considered a wayward eccentric, uncouth and squalid, overpassionate about sculpture. It is said that he was forced by his agent to put dirt on a sculpture to improve its resale value as a supposed antique. It took the Popes to tame him into becoming a fresco painter. His apprentice Condivi verified his indifference to food and drink, saying Michelangelo “slept in his clothes and boots”.

Caravaggio was considered dangerous and unruly, arriving in Rome naked, short of money and transient. Patrons began throwing money at his art, enabling the birth of modern art, but it did his rambunctious personality no good. His taste for confrontation led him into exile and death at 38 from a knife wound.

Picasso, that most inventive of all artists, never took a day off. No one can say he was in it for the money, in spite of having lived enough years to make plenty of it. He was always in touch with his changing creative vision. He is the populist 20th century as far as art is concerned.

Van Gogh is arguably the best artist of all time. During the four years from 1886 until his death in 1890 he created about 1,000 of the world's greatest masterpieces. Yet he never sold a painting in his lifetime. “I have a big fire in my soul,” he said, “but nobody comes to give some warmth.” His brother Theo was the only one who invested in his ability to keep painting. Van Gogh's only financial ambition was to earn enough to buy a crust of bread, a tube of yellow paint and to relieve Theo from having to subsidise him.

Dylan Thomas lived in poverty. He believed that the freedom of an artist to explore evocative expression more than compensated for a lack of plush comfort.

The genius sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka, the subject of my film Savage Messiah, was a passionate starving artist living in poverty, as were many of his friends in the Vorticist movement.

The Bloomsbury-ites of 1900 to 1920 were notoriously threadbare, yet the quality of their lives and loves enjoyed a richness, depth, colour and stunning clarity of expression - their love lives were in fact part of their artistic expression. Even so, Virginia Woolf said it was necessary for an artist to have “money and a room of one's own” to write fiction. (She herself had about £100 a year, worth about £3,700 today.) A modest request.

The ballet dancer Isadora Duncan (the subject of my BBC film The Biggest Dancer in the World) said that she was “so poor she hardly knew where the next bottle of champagne was coming from”. Wealth in artistic Bohemian Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was the exception. But being poor and living well (or at least theatrically) could go hand in hand. Nowadays sustained artistic creation under the burden of poverty seems harder to pull off.

Would it hurt so much to give artists a little money for doing what they are absolutely made to do? We must see that they are subsidised or that their part-time jobs are flexible enough to accommodate their main contribution, their art. Art is the very thing that gives our culture a leg-up by creating meaning, beauty and a glimpse of eternal forms. What we need is not more artists, nor fewer, but more saints - such as the Carnegie or MacArthur foundations - willing to sprinkle a little seed money into the path of deserving artists, that their tiny hands may not be frozen.

On the news a few days ago it was announced that in a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard a symphony orchestra has been reduced to a few singers wandering around the stage playing instruments. Before you know it, they'll be down to whistling. Or maybe they'll get the audience at it.

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