In four minutes on Season 3, The Sopranos nails the ethical dilemma that has long mired the art world. Carmela Soprano’s consultation with the Jewish shrink is priceless: Facing the truth about Tony, her mob-boss spouse, the upscale Mafia housewife tries to compartmentalize her marriage from its funding sources. She is loath to divorce. “Us Catholics, we place a great deal of stock in the sanctity of the family,” she explains. He bluntly advises her to leave: “You’ll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame as long as you’re his accomplice.” “All I do is make sure he has dinner on his table,” Carmela insists. “So ‘enabler’ would be a more accurate job description,” the therapist schools her. “I’m not charging you, because I won’t take blood money, and you can’t either. One thing you can’t say is that you haven’t been told.”

Like pious Carmela in her haute bourgeois drag, art museums are married to the mob. They want to be seen as temples to the creative spirit untouched by the ruthless machinations of capital, a blameless zone of public service, but a quick scan of their patrons reveals the truth. Asserting their sanctity, museums gentrify a rogue’s gallery of funders: banksters and hedge fund managers, fossil fuel oligarchs, private-prison and opioid profiteers. They demonstrate little compunction about art-washing predators whose business models are as antisocial as Tony’s. From the robber barons of yore—Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.—to today’s one percent, it is a hallowed tradition for apex greedheads to seek the halo of philanthropy by supporting the arts. Museum boards are crowded with the worst of the moneyed elite, permitting them to launder their reputations for plunder and pelf as they impress their rivals with lavish tax-deductible donations, reap prestige, and celebrate themselves with galas. Their philanthropy is socialism for the rich, an expression of everything wrong in our grotesquely unequal republic—“freedom’s land,” as Gore Vidal would say, “bravery’s home.”

Museum development departments market art-world cachet as tax-deductible corporate PR. It’s their de facto business model to custom-craft “collaborations” for sponsors as a strategy to defuse public concerns and deflect criticism. As a festering symptom of our culture’s capture by corporate interests, until very recently, this symbiotic relationship has caused not outrage but resignation, even abject appreciation—until, that is, the flurry of scandals that brought the whole devil’s bargain into public view. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists and activists have agitated effectively enough to oust a few choice specimens of the dirty-handed rich, among them tear gas magnate Warren Kanders, who resigned as vice chairman of the board of the Whitney in July, after eight artists pulled out of the Biennial in protest.

These events mark a significant disruption of the status quo. Art professionals (i.e., curators and staff) who wanted to advance (nay, survive) have historically had to be courtiers to the rich, willing to self-censor any gauche tendencies that might rub their patrons the wrong way. Such complicity with sponsors has been baked into the system since the 1970s, when NEA cuts threw arts organizations to the tender mercies of the marketplace. The tax break, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, has become “the most significant form of arts support” in the United States, where charitable donations to the arts far outstrip governmental financing.

Warren and Allison Kanders attend the Whitney Gala on December 11, 2012, in New York City. Ben Gabbe/Getty

The contradiction between the lofty stated values of the museum and the predatory exploits of its patrons would be great fodder for satire if it were not so deeply disturbing. Consider the Museum of Modern Art’s expansion, coming this October. “The museum didn’t emphasize female artists, didn’t emphasize what minority artists were doing, and it was limited on geography. Where those were always the exceptions, now they really should be part of the reality of the multicultural society we all live in,” said MoMA chairman and vulture capitalist Leon Black, whose former family charity director was prominent creep Jeffrey Epstein. Also creepy: Black’s fellow board member Larry Fink, who is the CEO of BlackRock, the second-largest investor in private prisons, which serve their for-profit goals at the expense of incarcerated populations, overwhelmingly people of color. The appalling Carmelaesque hypocrisy of these institutions, masking their dependency on dirty money with flamboyant shows of identity sensitivity, shocks nobody because it is simply business as usual. The new wing boasts a $50 million gift from trustee Steven Cohen, whose trusty Point72 hedge fund was created after his former firm, SAC Capital, pleaded guilty to fraud. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the wing will be hailed as progress.