Rich pickings and scorned aristocrats

When writers began to be able to break free of aristocratic patrons, in the 18th century, they were mightily relieved. It was a matter of self-respect, for the old system was full of opportunities for humiliation. One artist of the 17th century, as Marjorie Garber tells us in Patronizing the Arts, upon entering a noble household in Rome, was put on the same payroll level as three slaves, a gardener, a dwarf and an old nurse.

Patronage belonged to a feudal or aristocratic society, while the writers of 18th century London were members of a newly assertive middle class. Dr Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield ("Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?") is generally taken as the moment when the bourgeois writer told the aristocracy to get lost.

But patronage itself did not get lost. It got democratised. And the search for patronage became professionalised and was called fundraising. And today a conspicuous amount of attention is paid, in the world of museums, galleries and the arts, to the ability of directors to raise funds: from the state, from independent funding bodies, from business, from the rich.

It had almost become received wisdom until very recently that the job of a museum director had changed fundamentally, and that only the administrator/fundraiser/extension-builder need apply. Two prominent recent appointments - Nicholas Penny at the National Gallery in London, and Thomas Campbell at the Metropolitan Museum in New York - have asserted that the old values still obtain.

Penny is a curator and scholar with a very broad knowledge of the visual arts. Campbell, unexpectedly, came out of the Met's textile department: he is a phenomenal expert in the field of tapestries. I've seen both of his Met shows, which were based on a philosophy of borrowing only the very best works, in the very best condition, transporting and hanging them at phenomenal expense – and all this without apparently losing a night's sleep over the question "How many people will actually be interested in these tapestries?"

The answer, as it turned out, was a great number. But even if they had not turned into such successes, these shows and others like them were based on a philosophy that only the best is good enough for the public.

You could argue that this adherence to the very highest standards reflects well on the patrons (the museum's trustees are also significant patrons) of the Met: it's elitism, but it's elitism for everyone. American museums in general reflect the tastes and the collecting habits of their patrons, and the Met in particular seems of a piece with its adjacent, exclusive avenues and their astonishing apartments. Looking after the patrons is something the Met does very well. And the patrons respond well by looking after the Met.

In Patronizing the Arts Marjorie Garber compares the American experience of artistic patronage with that of various European countries, but she is notably out of date on the subject of France: she thinks commercial income for arts institutions is negligible, not noticing the Louvre's astounding multi-million euro franchising of its name and collections to Abu Dhabi. Her account of the British system concentrates, somewhat bizarrely, on the early years of the Arts Council, and rather dries up in 1965.

The British system involves a mixture of state and private patronage, and the organisations that have done best in recent years are those (like Tate Modern) that have known how to tap both resources. Garber hasn't begun to ask how, for instance, the National Theatre relates to the West End, or how orchestras are funded, or what the BBC does to support classical music. She's in a hurry. She doesn't stop to understand what she's talking about, and her book ends up as a mess – a much tossed salad of haphazard research, cheeky at times and, at others, patronising. ·