Sure. You could say precisely the same about a politician who accepts money from a mafia or large corporation. What you are saying is not a counterargument when the entire point of the article is a criticism of a system based around this exchange (in the same way I imagine you wouldn't defend political corruption).
The argument they make later for why crowdfunding for paying for people's medical treatment is basically sound: most developed countries have universal healthcare, after all. One can intuitively understand the moral argument of "people shouldn't have to go around begging for donations because they got cancer". The article just doesn't say why that applies to artists, too. Unless you want to just make the hyper-general argument of, "like, you shouldn't have to work for money, maaaan."
edit: basically it's hard to take critique of business behavior from marxists seriously because 90% of the time it seems to come down to "profit is immoral, full communism now", and unless you're willing to go for that, the arguments they present are completely useless.
...except that is illegal and an absurd example, and the "artist" explicitly sought patrons to provide him money in exchange for his product.
If an "artist" opens a business and attracts clients then he needs to serve his clients with the business he advertised, even if you use strawman arguments to compare them to organized crime.
Or to put it another way: if you object to people having power via controlling the flow of resources, don't propose a state monopoly as an alternative to a more distributed system.