Culture and conscience
David Gee asks: why are so many corporations now sponsoring the arts?
There was a minor furore last year when the Poetry Book Society, which organises Britain’s most prestigious poetry award, the T S Eliot Prize, lost Arts Council funding and a hedge fund firm called Aurum stepped in to save it.
The organisers of the prize were relieved but two of the ten shortlisted poets pulled out. One, John Kinsella, described hedge funds as ‘at the very pointy end of capitalism’ and at odds with his ethics. The other, Alice Oswald, wrote in The Guardian that her instinct was to stand with those who were questioning the practices of firms like Aurum, rather than endorse it by remaining in the running for the £15,000 prize.
But there are pragmatic poets, too. One of the judges for the prize, Gillian Clarke, wrote in the same newspaper that not one coin in our pockets is clean; such is the world we live in. Aurum’s sponsorship meant that good, underpaid poets would be better rewarded for what they do, she said, while publishers could push up their meagre sales and poems would touch the lives of more people. The T S Eliot Prize ‘cleans the money’ that Aurum gives, she argued.
The Poetry Book Society is a minnow among many larger national arts institutions now benefiting from an injection of City cash. Are the arts benefiting from a new era of corporate philanthropy akin to the nineteenth century benevolence of a Rowntree or Cadbury, or are they degraded by accepting money from hedge funds, oil giants and the like?
The public imagination
It would be churlish to criticise an earnest desire among the rich to share their wealth and make it work for the world, but it would also be naïve to think that this is mainly what we are seeing. Corporate sponsorship of the arts is first a business decision, in which the main trophy is prime advertising space. With regular advertising media now saturated, company logos greet the public outside theatres and galleries, on exhibition posters in the street, in printed programmes and on arts websites. Some companies even get to name events after themselves. The Shell Classic International Season, Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and BP Portrait Award are examples of companies using the arts to pay for a place in the public imagination. Sponsoring businesses also enjoy ‘extensive client entertaining opportunities’, as Accenture puts it, giving them a wow-factor advantage over rivals.
Of the major arts organisations, the National Theatre is among the most conspicuously generous to its sponsors. Overlooking the Thames in central London, the theatre’s huge digital display advertises, apart from its plays, four finance giants and an electronics multinational. The state still gives the theatre three times as much funding as all its corporate sponsors combined. Even so, the Arts Council, which supports the theatre on behalf of the public, does not get its name flashed across the river like the corporations do.
Benefactors?
As we know from the High Street, advertising colonises public space in order to get us believing in something we didn’t before. By allying their brands with the big arts houses, corporations are able to promote themselves as leading social benefactors. We are invited, quietly, to forget that the same companies have played a leading role in driving up inequality, unbalancing our economy to the point of dependency upon City finance and consumerism and entrenching society in an unsustainable relationship with the Earth.
On the other hand, arts organisations say they can do more than ever before. With the City’s help they support pioneering creative work, run extensive youth programmes and keep ticket prices low so more people can participate. But the way things are done also matters. For many creative people (and we are all that) the integrity of their art depends on how well they hold with a feeling for what is true – even when pressured to acquiesce with a lie. Alice Oswald puts it like this: ‘For me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull.’
In this respect, the arts have much in common with some kinds of experiential faith, including Quakerism. When artists, writers and performers feel led by that ‘faint, honest voice’ they become involved in something ineluctably counter-cultural from the beginning.
The creations of artists can show us our situation afresh and inspire a more visionary, life-affirming way of being in the world. Immersed, as we are, in corporate-led consumer-capitalism, the arts can still cut through its fakery and help bring us back to what we are as human beings on Earth. It’s difficult to do this while flying the flag for JP Morgan or Shell.
Creativity
Even when arts organisations do not share a commitment to art as an expression of political responsibility, most believe it can enrich our humanity. This is reason enough for big arts institutions, in particular, to weigh what they do, including fundraising, against progressively more challenging ethical criteria. Would this be financially risky? Some have argued so, but actually most major galleries, theatres and museums rely on sponsors for only around five to fifteen per cent of their income – not a level of dependency yet.
The Poetry Book Society’s situation was different, faced as it was with a financial crisis when it lost state funding. But the occasion of Aurum’s sponsorship will still allow the government to argue that state funding was not needed all along, proving for David Cameron that the Big Society works. As the National Theatre and others woo more corporate sponsors, they could inadvertently pave the way for the government’s exit from the scene.
When times are tight, as our cabinet’s eighteen millionaires often tell us they are, it matters most that state funding for core services like the NHS is preserved. But a humane, vibrant society also needs plays, poems, paintings and performance and the government has a role in using our taxes to support them on our behalf. Funding the arts does not only mean the South Bank either, but Opera North, the museums of Glasgow and grassroots community organisations facilitating creativity across Britain. It is here that some of the most pioneering creativity is happening, often on a shoestring.
Common sponsorship
The word ‘sponsor’ comes from the Latin spondere meaning ‘to guarantee’ or ‘to give assurance to’. If the arts are an attempt at humane honesty, as Alice Oswald suggests poetry can be, then they are worthy of our common sponsorship. Businesses have their part to play, but genuinely philanthropic sponsors will neither expect executive perks, nor want arts buildings to go the way of football stadia, garbed in corporate logos. When something is inseparable from our humanity, making a commodity of it diminishes us. The arts should not be for sale.
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