The last decade of art-market madness may have spawned a new breed of collector-speculator, but it has also greatly expanded the ranks of collector-patrons. As federal funding has dried up, especially in the U.S., more collectors have stepped in to commission new works or otherwise fund artists directly. And everyone from Eugenio Lopez, in Los Angeles, to Charles Saatchi, in London, have been dubbed modern-day Medicis. 

But one glance at the history of the Medici family — whose commissions of art and architecture were always part of some larger power play — reveals that patronage is never completely neutral or selfless. So why have we yet to see a serious and broad-minded book about the complex dynamics of patronage? Where is the study exploring its various causes and effects?

Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts is not quite that book. A professor of English literature at Harvard University, Garber sets out to discuss the history of the benefactor-artist relationship from the Medicis to the present day. Most powerfully, she exposes the fact that patronage is related not only etymologically but psychologically to the act of patronizing — or condescending — as this kind of philanthropy often creates a fraught financial dependency. She productively compares the relationship of patron and artist to that of lover and beloved as Freud defined it, with all the "attendant fantasies, appropriations, misunderstandings and disappointments."

Garber displays a great range of knowledge, considering patronage in poetry as well as in painting. But her book reads like a series of mini-lectures on everything from the wealthy widow Charlotte van de Veer Quick Mason’s overly romantic support of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes to Leonard Riggio’s championship of artists at Dia Beacon, which ended after the institution’s director, Michael Govan, left for Los Angeles. Although each of these topics is interesting in its own right, it is never entirely clear how they connect to one another, let alone to her ultimate argument: that universities should fund the arts as they do the sciences — that is, more aggressively and less conditionally. Growing less and less focused, the study collapses in its final pages into weird repetitions, an odd cut-and-paste job of sentences that appeared earlier in the book.

On the other hand, The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, provides new tools for examining patronage today. It grew out of a session at the College Art Association’s 2002 conference in which the book’s authors, the Harvard economist Richard Zeckhauser and the Syracuse-based art historian Jonathan Nelson, used the economic model of signaling to understand patronage. Developed by the Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence, signaling theory describes how individuals make costly decisions to communicate potentially remunerative messages about themselves. The classic example is a college student completing an expensive degree, if only to "signal" to the world that he or she is worthy of better jobs.

In their book, Zeckhauser and Nelson, along with a few other academics invited to contribute essays, identify Renaissance businessmen’s paying dearly for ownership rights to private chapels as another prime instance of signaling — sending self-promoting messages about such factors as their net worth and social access, their families’ power, their devotion to their city and their commitment to God. The idea is that a patron hires an artist for the same reasons that a ceo hires an ad agency: to communicate a number of concrete or intangible values.

If the messages convey specific facts, the authors call it "signposting," giving as an example the use of the Scottish thistle and white rose as ornamental elements in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Boston museum — and in John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her — to signal her descent from the Stuart royal house. They term it "stretching" when the historical facts are exaggerated, as in Catherine de Medicis’s idealized portrait by Alessandro Tiarini, which she commissioned from the Bolognese painter after another painter had rendered her nose too large.

The only thing the book lacks is an analysis of today’s conspicuous art consumption. Perhaps the authors felt it was out of their area of expertise, or maybe they didn’t want to risk libel suits by exposing the not-so-benevolent intentions in the altruistic-seeming gestures of living figures. But there is no doubt that the court of contemporary art is crowded with power brokers who leverage their relationships with artists to consolidate their social standing and broadcast something to the world about their grasp of culture. One suggestion, should the authors ever go this route: They ought to look at the megacollectors (some would say megalomaniacs) who build private museums in their own names. To be even more specific, they should start with the billionaire art enthusiasts who align themselves with — and accrue the shiny stainless-steel prestige of — work by Jeff Koons.

"Strings Attached" originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2009 Table of Contents.