Among its many lively claims to a place in history, the summer of 2024 will surely come to be known as the one that finally killed corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Recently a group of literary festivals divested themselves of Baillie Gifford, a company that had helped fund them for decades, for the crime of being some two per cent invested in businesses related to fossil fuels. And now South Kensington’s Science Museum has sacked a big sponsor of its own: Equinor, a Norwegian oil company.
It feels as if some final wall of resistance has been breached. The Science Museum has until now a record of standing up to activist pressure, as corporate partnerships fell elsewhere: in recent years Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Shakespeare Company have all shed sponsors on moral grounds. But now the museum has deemed Equinor to have failed to limit its carbon emissions sufficiently, and it will no longer take its filthy lucre. What now for philanthropy and the arts? Is this new purity test really what we want?
Let’s get three things out of the way. Any reasonable person must accept that climate change is our biggest challenge, that polluting companies should face consequences and that climate activism has been essential in pushing us towards a greener world.
Is the best way to sanction polluting companies really through their philanthropy? Companies simply sail on; it is the arts and charities that suffer
But we must ask: is the best way to sanction polluting companies really through their philanthropy? And will it even work? Activists seem to believe that the disgrace of having one’s name removed from a gilded door will be enough to have corporations sobbing for forgiveness and vowing to change their ways. But that’s not what has happened so far. Companies simply sail on, perhaps, as Baillie Gifford did, putting an end to some other good deeds on the way out. It is the arts and charities that suffer.
There is a hint of an argument that says allowing fossil fuel companies to burnish their name on plaques, prizes and above wings of museums helps to launder their reputation — but only a hint. No-one believes that BP is any less polluting because it sponsors the British Museum — if you do, a quick google will disabuse you of that notion. In fact, if anything these days, sponsoring grand British institutions is a reputational risk. It puts your head above the parapet.
I’m not saying there is no line that cannot be crossed, no sponsor that is not acceptable. On that line, I think, is the Sackler family — responsible for a large part of America’s Oxycontin addiction crisis. But when it was at last removed from its various charitable causes, this constituted the final closed door shutting it out of polite society. The most important slammed doors had come much earlier, and they were legal ones: Sacklers can never again produce opioids, and must pay billions in damages.
But it is odd to prevent companies from doing good works while you still buy their products. If you’re heating your house and filling your car with fossil fuels, it is strange to stop those companies giving their money to things such as museums and art galleries. It seems the wrong way round — as if museum owners of the 18th century had turned down slavers’ money “on principle”, while continuing to use slaves themselves.
No, philanthropy is not an effective lever to pull if you care about the climate. Especially as it is a lever that does collateral damage.
And the damage could be considerable. Unlike in Europe, the UK does not have a massive state subsidy for the arts. And where the arts are given cash, it can come with strings attached, such as the requirement to produce high minded, worthy stuff with broad appeal. Last March, the English National Opera found itself being instructed by the Arts Council to move out of London, in order to justify its funding. It has now set up shop in Manchester. And the ENO is one of the lucky ones — museums all over Britain are struggling to keep the lights on as local councils cut their expenditure.
Corporate sponsorship is still vital for museums and arts institutions. The Science Museum had previously been staunch in defending its sponsors. That it is giving in to activists is a bad sign —will any company be pure enough to give money away to good causes?
