Patronizing the Arts

"Patronizing the Arts is a brilliantly nuanced assessment of why universities must become art patrons. Learning from the twentieth-century university's embrace of Big Science, Garber argues that twenty-first-century universities must rigorously devote their attention to Big Art. Provocative, witty, and layered, Patronizing the Arts cogently demonstrates the advantages for both art and the university in this new and radical alliance."--Peggy Phelan, author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

"Marjorie Garber is that rare thing, a polymath with wit, able to take common sense to metaphysical levels. In her new book she brings her formidable intelligence and gift for plain speaking to a topic of great importance in all our lives. Adducing uncannily apt examples drawn from the most unexpected corners of high and low culture (and everything in between), she demonstrates the necessity of imaginative patronage if the arts are to flourish in a republic that is ambivalent about them."--Michael Holquist, professor emeritus, Yale University

"Engrossing as a novel but as fact-filled as an encyclopedia, Marjorie Garber's Patronizing the Arts covers the field of contemporary art patronage with assurance and sophistication. Bringing to bear an impressive range of historical precedents, linking art and science as similar fields of exploration and innovation, Garber rejects clichéd thinking about the subject of patronage, and at the same time offers timely and thoughtful solutions to the myriad problems involved in supporting the arts today."--Linda Nochlin, author of Courbet

"Marjorie Garber writes with an elegant directness, and her prose sparkles. Patronizing the Arts shows Garber at the top of her form."--David Damrosch, Columbia University

"Garber's book is a pleasure to read. Artists, critics, journalists, scholars, and art-minded readers will find this book engaging, as well as very smart."--Peter Conn, University of Pennsylvania

"With its shrewd analysis and its knowledgeable reflections on the state of the arts, as well as a rich array of anecdotes and quotations about patronage, Patronizing the Arts will appeal to a broad audience."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

Publishers Weekly

The title of Garber's erudite, incisive study contains the crux of her persuasive proposal: though financially supported by foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals, the arts are also deemed "nonessential." These two types of patronizing, Garber argues with wit and aplomb, have led to art's simultaneous devaluation (as "recreational") and overvaluation (as transcendent). This paradox is not a problem requiring a solution, she says, but rather, an inevitable dialectic. Harvard English professor Garber (Vested Interests: Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety), begins by uncovering the contradictions inherent in patronage: the word's very origin is the Latin pater, "father," and its connections to patriarchy, she says, are not coincidental. Garber traces the patron/artist relationship through the centuries and considers the new class of "American Medicis" in the private, government and corporate sectors. She counterbalances the paradox of patronage with the "paradox of the artist," whose work's usefulness lies in its "apparent uselessness." Garber concludes with a call for increased arts patronage by colleges and universities. Her stimulating analyses, both highly informed and refreshingly unpedantic, will be of great interest to the scholar and general reader who appreciates a salient cultural critique. (Sept.)

Marjorie Garber teaches English at Harvard University, where she also chairs the Visual and Environmental Studies Department and directs the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. Her many books include "Shakespeare After All" and "Academic Instincts" (Princeton).