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