This paper engages with some of the ways Moroccan cultural production and the patronage system impact the growth of the public sphere in postcolonial Morocco. The enmeshed relationship between cultural production and patronage demonstrates not only the ideological and political underpinnings of different patronage schemes carried out by state institutions since the 1960s but also highlights the struggle of artists to reconcile the intellectual legacy and aesthetics of the 1960s with the contemporary forces of the market. The paper will argue that while the interdependent relationship between cultural workers and state institutions or private corporations has helped increase cultural production and inscribed cultural works into an international marketplace, it has also enhanced state dominance, ‘naturalized’ art’s ties to the market, curbed the development of the public sphere, and accentuated forms of inequity among cultural workers. The focus is on plastic arts, the cultural field which best illustrates the state and private capital’s efforts to incorporate cultural production into global economic and aesthetic systems while foregrounding the struggle between competing ideological and societal projects.