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Tate trustee criticises BP sponsorship

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 2 Dec 2011

One of the Tate’s corporate sponsors BP has been branded “a disgrace” by one of the organisation’s trustees who has also applauded the protestors which disrupt Tate events to campaign against the oil company.

Comments made in June by artist 'Bob and Roberta Smith', whose real name is Patrick Brill, feature in Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil, a publication released earlier this week and produced by anti-oil sponsorship campaigners Liberate Tate, Platform and Art Not Oil.

In his comments, Brill criticises BP’s plans to dig for oil in the Arctic tar sands. “We should have a moratorium on the seas and stop deep drilling,” he is quoted as saying. “When activists protest at, for example, events like the Tate summer party, that is a thoroughly good thing. It allows me to say: BP is a disgrace.”

The publication adds to the spotlight on institutions' relationships with murky money, launching in the same week as the London School for Economics came under fire for accepting donations from another controversial major donor, the foundation run by former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif, in a separate report.

Brill defended his decision to remain on the Tate board, on which he has sat since July 2009 when appointed by the Prime Minister, calling the galleries’ relationship with BP “nuanced and complex and full of contradictions”.

“I am critical of BP and yet I sit on the Tate board,” he said. “I’m on that board because I believe in the power of art. Art is important; yet art is under threat. That is why I sit on that board. I will not leave the board because of protests about BP, but these protests are important.

“Protest does put pressure on Tate. That’s a good thing. And via that, protests also put pressure on BP.”

While subsidised by government, private funding has become increasingly important to the Tate. The organisation says that in 2008/2009 60 per cent of its funding was derived from non-government sources. The Not if But When report “guestimates” that 12 per cent of the Tate’s sponsorship income comes from BP. The organisation does not disclose the actual amount.

A statement from Tate in response to the publication praised the work of BP in supporting the arts in the country.

“BP is one of the most important sponsors of the arts in the UK supporting Tate as well as several other leading cultural institutions,” the statement read.   

“The Tate Trustees first agreed a sponsorship policy in 1991, and more recently incorporated its principles within an ethics policy in 2008. The board and ethics committee regularly review compliance with the policy.

"BP has worked with Tate since 1990 and fits within the guidelines of this policy. Its support has been instrumental in helping Tate develop access to the Tate Collection and to present changing displays of work by a wide range of artists in the national collection of British Art.”
 

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