The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level.

It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s central conceit—that the arts in America “are doubly patronized,” simultaneously overvalued as transcendent and priceless yet “condescended to, looked down upon, considered as recreational rather than serious work” (xi). If only that was the worst of it. A glance at policy papers advocating dissolution of the NEA or at commentary surrounding the proposed closing of Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, the sale of the University of Iowa’s Jackson Pollock, or the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek exhibition will more likely convince the reader that (visual) arts are not so much condescended to as reviled by a substantial portion of the American population, grossly misunderstood by many others, and regarded as irrelevant by an even greater number.

In these key instances, we have been reminded that issues of patronage and popular perception remain closely intertwined. What arts advocates acutely need at this moment is a thorough, unflinching examination of how we talk about the arts and why the convictions that undergird our deeply held commitments to making, studying, exhibiting, and preserving them are getting so lost in translation. Unfortunately, Patronizing the Arts is not likely to prompt that kind of intense self-scrutiny, nor does it furnish a compelling case for why governments, corporations, or individuals should find it worth the trouble to get involved in the messy business of art patronage in the first place.

Patronizing the Arts is the fourteenth book published by Garber, who serves as the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of English at Harvard. In previous volumes, she has written extensively on Shakespeare, sexuality, popular culture, and academia. The Garber that speaks from these pages, however, is Garber the humanities trustee, advisor, and administrator, who formerly served as president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. The primary impulse animating Patronizing the Arts does not seem to be—as the book’s title, preface, cover art, and publicity materials would suggest—a desire to provide an in-depth accounting of the nature of the patronage relationship itself, but rather to outline a new, interdisciplinary program of arts support within the university setting. Much of the data and many of the arguments gathered here carry the flavor of research gleaned for the purposes of convincing colleagues, administrators, and donors of the ongoing need to bolster the position of the arts and humanities within the college curriculum. Thus what is framed as a study of patronage—the financial lifeline that for better or worse has always linked the artist to a public, however conceived—turns out to be instead a somewhat unimaginative and circular instance of the academy talking to itself.

Fundamentally, Garber is seeking big support for what she calls “Big Art,” artistic practice reimagined on the scale of “Big Science” and “Big Sports” and with all the financial resources and devoted advocacy those fields enjoy. In her view the university has the opportunity to become the crucible in which artists of all kinds are offered “disinterested but informed support” that allows them freedom and facilities to collaborate, experiment, succeed, and fail (45). Private donors and even state and national governments, she suggests, would do better to eschew direct funding of artists in favor of threading their support through institutions of higher learning, which could provide a buffer against the intrusive (if enthusiastic) demands of an individual sponsor, on the one hand, and against outcries over specific uses (or misuses) of taxpayer funds, on the other. She imagines this “Big Art” being pursued in new and enlarged facilities—essentially arts laboratories—that would help move the arts, physically and pedagogically, from the margins to the center of university life and learning, and would provide increased opportunities for community engagement and enrichment.

These ideas are set forward in the book’s culminating fifth chapter, “The University as Patron,” and although Garber insists that she does not intend “to advocate for the university instead of private philanthropy, galleries and museums, or government programs” (emphasis in original) as ideal patrons, this is in effect what Patronizing the Arts does: her dedication to a university-centered model determines the shape and content of preceding chapters, and leaves her with little incentive to suggest workable solutions for the very real obstacles encountered by other types of U.S. art patronage (192). This is problematic—and not only because so many humanities departments, far from being in a position to expand and diversify, are now suffering from particularly stringent budgetary belt-tightening. Her commitment to one patronage model at the expense of the others makes for some very unsatisfying reading in the foregoing sections.

The first chapter, “The Paradox of Patronage,” offers an idiosyncratic history of arts patronage that moves at a breakneck pace, taking the reader from Maecenas to the dealer-critic system, for example, in the span of five pages. Other than an extended detour into case studies of British and American poets laureate grappling with real problems and real politics, there are few examples to help readers understand why and how the United States government should subsidize aesthetic production.

Politics are more completely the subject of the second chapter, “Governing Assumptions,” which considers state patronage in the United States. Here Garber anthologizes a number of familiar case studies, from complications encountered by Federal Art Project muralists in the 1930s and 1940s, to the CIA’s foray into funding Cold War cultural initiatives, to controversies surrounding works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in the late 1980s. Garber’s emphasis on the disagreements and misunderstandings that she sees as fundamental to state patronage in the United States is unfortunately decoupled from a sense that such problems can or should be solved, creating a situation in which one would not be surprised to see her well-intentioned analysis thrown back in the face of arts advocates by those who wish to abolish such funding altogether.

In chapter 3, “Minding the Business of Art,” Garber turns to the business world. Although her discussion begins with a tantalizing quote from the Container Corporation of America’s Leo Schoenhofen, who in the late 1960s confidently declared that, “industry must begin truly to believe in the arts, believe in them enough to use them selfishly, to put them to work for business rather than serving merely as corporate decoration,” the chapter generally fails to follow up on this crucial line of thinking, or to press important questions about how and why the arts are mobilized by and within the corporate sphere (100). Such questions have become increasingly urgent, as entities like Bank of America have now begun to produce and circulate “turnkey exhibitions” of their own collections, complete with didactic materials, which appeal to regional museums with small budgets and staffs. This trend risks further dampening the critical curatorial voice and underscores the necessity of probing the meaning of corporate artistic holdings—not simply to write them off as “cultural capital,” but to ask whether, for example, a corporation’s artistic taste might be seen to construct a particular kind of employee, manager, or viewer-as-customer. If such collections do not conflict with a corporate entity’s carefully constructed public image, in what ways might they reinforce it, cognitively or conceptually? This is a line of investigation worth pursuing across the full historical spectrum of American art, which has frequently been collected and sponsored by businesspeople, and has so often been transformed, through the alchemy of philanthropy, into national cultural patrimony.

Garber’s fourth chapter, which probes the intersections between the arts and the sciences, is by far the most useful and thought-provoking section of the book. This is not a new topic, but Garber’s innovation is to use scholarship like that presented in Caroline Jones and Peter Gallison’s edited volume, Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998), to prod readers to think about how underscoring the experimental, collaborative, deliberately questioning aspects of artmaking practices might make those practices (and their stakes) more concrete and intelligible to fields outside the humanities. In response to those who would cut arts funding and education in order to bolster the sciences, Garber insists that these fields should be understood as complementary rather than competitive, as both pursue “creative, imaginative, and boundary-breaking work, work that reframes questions, and that is constituted to lead to more questions, rather than to any final answer” (153). Underscoring such continuities may enable the arts to enlarge the patronage pool by drawing from government, corporate, and individual sources already dedicated to supporting those investigations in the scientific realm. While not exactly a specific blueprint for future action, Garber’s musings in this chapter push readers to think about ways of altering vocabularies and reframing arguments in order to better reveal and preserve the vitality, the necessity, the concretely beneficial effects of artmaking in contemporary U.S. culture. Patronizing the Arts would have benefitted greatly from an infusion of this forward-thinking, outward-looking energy throughout, directed toward the possibilities (rather than the impossibilities) of patronage, and refusing the false securities of a well-equipped ivory tower complete with dance floors and exhibition spaces.