BP’s Tate sponsorship smaller than expected

Campaigners force gallery to disclose it has received £4m from 1990 to 2006

By Julia Michalska. Web only
Published online: 26 January 2015

A visitor at Tate Britain. Photo courtesy of Tate

The Tate in London received £4m in sponsorship from the energy giant BP between 1990 and 2006, the UK institution revealed today. In a statement, the Tate says the sum constitutes “considerable funding”, but according to campaigners who supported the Freedom of Information request challenged by the gallery, it is lower than might be expected.

See also:

• • The Tate should take BP’s money—and ask for more

The campaign group Platform, which helped bring the case to court and has accused the Tate of providing BP with a “veneer of respectability”, had previously estimated BP’s annual sponsorship to be £500,000. From the 1990s to 2006, the average annual figure is around £235,000, climbing from £150,000 more than two decades ago to £330,000 in 2006. The Tate describes these figures as “historic” and declines to reveal recent or current sponsorship details due to their commercial sensitivity. 

In 2012, the environmental campaigner Glen Tarman, along with the art collective Liberate Tate, made Freedom of Information requests to petition Tate to reveal details of its sponsorship deal with BP. The case went to court after the Tate withheld some of the information. In December, an information tribunal ordered the gallery to disclose details of its sponsorship deal with BP within 35 days. The deadline ran out today.

Anna Galinka of Platform said in a statement: “The figures are embarrassingly small for the Tate to go on justifying its BP relationship.” But the cultural sociologist Tiffany Jenkins says that even though the figures are relatively small, it does not mean “they are not vital”. She says: “They are also going in the right direction: up, when much of the funding to the arts is going down. It’s certainly not a reason to drop a sponsor. It’s reason surely to ask nicely for more. Hopefully campaigners will now stop using the law to hound museums and let them get on with the business of showing great art.”

The Tate says of BP’s sponsorship: “Its support has been instrumental in helping the Tate develop access to the Tate Collection and to present displays of work by a wide range of artists in the national collection of British Art.” The Tate adds that the energy company’s sponsorship fits within the guidelines of its ethics policy, which it introduced in 2008. 

For a comment on BP’s sponsorship of the Tate by Tiffany Jenkins, see The Art Newspaper’s February issue.

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Museums United Kingdom

The Tate should take BP’s money—and ask for more

Protests about the gallery’s lack of transparency over its sponsorship miss the point

By Tiffany Jenkins. Web only
Published online: 22 January 2015

Protesters at Tate Modern in September. © 2014 Demotix

Last September, more than 100 members of the art collective Liberate Tate, founded in 2010, filed into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, flung open a 64-metre square of black cloth, and held it aloft for two hours in a performance intended as a reinterpretation of Kazimir Malevich’sBlack Square. This political protest made reference to the Tate’s use of black marks in redacting information in minutes from an internal meeting about its sponsorship deal with the energy company BP (formerly British Petroleum), which the gallery is being asked to disclose after legal action brought by the group.

See also:

• • BP’s Tate sponsorship smaller than expected

It was one of a series of artistic responses accompanying a complex legal battle to compel the Tate to reveal details of its dealings with BP. Lasting nearly three years so far, the machinations have involved a Freedom of Information (FoI) request; a response to that request from the Tate; a complaint to the information commissioner that the response was not adequate; responses, called decision notices, from the information commission to the complaint, and an appeal against the decision notices. 

The case reached a climax on 22 December, when a tribunal ruled that the museum must divulge sponsorship figures dating from 1990 to 2006; but also that the museum did not have to publish as much of the minutes as stated in one of the decision notices. In other words, some of the black squares might stay. The Tate has until 26 January to appeal against the decision.

The case began in 2012 when the environmental campaigner Glen Tarman, supported by Liberate Tate, subjected the Tate to FoI requests to reveal the total sponsorship the gallery had received from BP for each of the previous 23 years; minutes from ethics committee meetings where the renewal of the sponsorship agreement had been discussed and approved; and any requests BP may have made for confidentiality. London’s National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and the Natural History Museum all received similar FoI requests and published the amounts they received. But the Tate dragged its heels, citing various legal exemptions, withholding the figures and blacking out parts of the documents, publishing only the confidentiality cause and a list of dates for when the ethics committee met. 

By applying pressure on the Tate and other institutions the ambition of campaigners is to bring to an end the funding of the arts by oil companies. Such sponsorship benefits the corporations, providing them with a veneer of respectability, while they are busy trashing the planet, activists argue; it is “greenwashing”. But cutting such funds is an alarming aim—one that ignores the realities of funding and poses a danger to the arts. 

Art thrives on the money of the rich, the immoral and the powerful. The Medici banking family was partly responsible for the flourishing of Renaissance Florence, supporting some of the greatest artists who have lived. Without the money of these wealthy men and their enemies the Borgias the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, Fra Angelico and Leonardo da Vinci might never have been created. The Guggenheims became philanthropists after running mining interests that would, conceivably, today be considered criminal. Yet the Guggenheim museums benefit every single visitor.

That is not to suggest that every museum is funded by “dirty” money, more that it is difficult to identify money that is good and clean and money that is not. BP is a legitimate company and we all use oil. We drive cars, sit in houses and offices warmed by central heating and lit with electricity. And art needs lots of money, regardless of whether it’s from the Holy See, Big Oil or the state. If it is from a legal corporation, the arts should take the money, especially in this economic climate. 

This is not simply about pocketing the cash and running. The demand made was that the Tate should reveal all details about a sponsorship deal—all the dollars and cents—and minutes from internal meetings. Lawyers working for the museum argued that it should be exempt from revealing the funds because it was information provided in confidence and could be prejudicial to commercial interests. They argued that withholding information from the minutes was supportable because disclosure would inhibit provision of free and frank advice, and that it could be a threat to public safety. Most of these are arguments are sensible; the final one is questionable.

There are good reasons why the Tate and others should not have to reveal every penny of financial arrangements: sponsorship deals are commercial. As all fundraisers know, you ask for more than you get and this requires a certain degree of smoke and mirrors. It is conceivable, for example, that the Tate does not want to reveal how much it receives because it is not quite as much as other sponsors—and future ones—think. This is what campaigners believe. Liberate Tate used available information to estimate that the Tate receives from BP about £500,000 a year—only 0.3% of Tate’s overall operating budget. They argue that this shows oil money is not as essential as is suggested. But does it? After all, every penny counts. The museum should take the money and ask for more. 

The broader obsession with transparency fails to recognise that withholding information can be beneficial, especially in relation to the request that the Tate publish minutes from meetings. Internal discussion, where people can speak their minds freely without fearing everyone will find out what they said, is vital to coming to informed decisions. Those with a zeal for openness need to recognise that demands to show everything can undercut essential deliberation. 

The Tate also turned to questionable arguments to justify keeping information out of the public domain. Lawyers for the museum argued that revealing information from the minutes could cause further protest, thus posing a threat to health and safety—citing the danger of accidental slips in the course of any protest. This is a daft and opportunistic argument, one that, if deemed legitimate in one instance, could be used against museums on other occasions to shut down controversial exhibitions. Protest is legitimate, whether you agree with the agitators or not. 

There is no doubt that all funders want something for their money and it is crucial that they do not interfere in curatorial decisions—museums must be fiercely independent on this front. It is therefore sensible to draw on a mix of sources—public and private—so as not to become overly dependent on any single one. But museums should accept all cheques—for large or small sums. Let the sponsors have their logos brandished about and let them have their fancy parties in the museum’s galleries; and by all means flatter their egos and be effusive in thanking them: they deserve it.

Tiffany Jenkins is the author of Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections, published by Routledge