Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Take The Money & Run? - Some Positions On Ethics, Business Sponsorship & Making Art
Take The Money & Run? - Some Positions On Ethics, Business Sponsorship & Making Art
2012
Cover image credit: Liberate Tate, Human Cost, 2011, Photo: Amy Scaife
@thisisliveart
www.platformlondon.org
@platformlondon
Foreword
There are lots of guides for artists on how to earn a living from art
or how to raise funds to support making it, but few which help us
ask what the ethical implications are of the routes we choose. In this
Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide, Jane Trowell of
arts, social justice and environmental group Platform has selected
some key texts that we think are useful in helping to position
ourselves ethically with regard to financing or supporting artistic
practice through business or corporate sponsorship. All the books
or documents featured can be found in the LADA Study Room,
according to their individual codes as listed.
Jane Trowell is a member of Platform, a collective that brings
together artists, activists, researchers and campaigners who
collaborate to make work on social and ecological justice. Our
practice is founded on the principle of interdisciplinary creativity as
the key tool in creating systemic change. Platforms current focus
is on moving society away from our dependence on fossil fuels
because of their negative impacts on human rights, ecology, culture,
and environmental justice. Platform looks at what Britains role is in
this story, in terms of government, corporate interests and the wider
For many countries, the credit crunch has been used by rightwing governments as an excuse for drastic cuts in arts and cultural
funding, as part of a general assault on any existing welfare state
provision. In the Netherlands in 2011, the government announced
draconian cuts to state funding of 200 million - 166 million which could result in 60% of mainly small- or middle-scale arts
organisations folding in 2013. With the future looking uncertain for
hundreds of cultural organizations, the race for private sponsorship
has begun. [1]
In England in 2010, Arts Council England was forced by the current
coalition government to deliver a 30% cut to its budget between
2011 and 2015, a total of 100 million. 50% of cuts will be to its own
running costs, and 15% to be cut from core support to arts and
artists. 200 organisations lost their core funding in March 2011. At
the same time, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)
has required ACE to foster a culture of philanthropy over and above
sector; and finally there are those pragmatists who say the race is
to the quick vs those who argue for a systemic and systematic revolt
against the corporatisation of the arts. And there are many shades
in-between.
At an event at the ICA in London called Public Art, Private Money
[3], among the seven-person, all-white, all-male panel, the landslide
of opinion on ethics and arts sponsorship was that private sector
sponsorship is the new reality and we just have to get on with it.
On the topic of the controversy surrounding sponsorship by BP of
Tate and other large arts institutions in the wake of the Deepwater
Horizon disaster, the following positions emerged:
This is not the time to be squeamish
- Christopher Frayling, former Chairman of Arts Council England, and
former Rector of the Royal College of Art
All moneys dirty money. Not that Im saying BPs money is dirty
- Alex Beard, Deputy Director of Tate
The first person you go to [for sponsorship] is someone with an image
problem
- Frayling again
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or shown, and how it may or may not steer the very course of the
work. In other words, censorship. Subtle or direct influence is always
exerted by those financing the work. Its part of the deal. Whether
its the church, the state, the ruling classes with disposable income,
businesses (or a collective where each puts a tenner in the pot). At
its most pernicious, such influence can turn into self-censorship by
artists and arts organisations. Thats when it gets dangerous, but how
do you spot this before it beds in?
The texts selected for this Study Room Guide therefore aim to
provoke the reader to establish your own lines in a complex
battleground, to ascertain your own limits - your overall position, and
in more detail, who you would and wouldnt get into bed with for
financial support, and why?
for All: Their Policies and
#1 Art
Our Culture
eds Mary Warnock and Mark
Wallinger, 2000, Peer
LADA Study Room code: P0225
12
one hand in a Golden Age of state funding, and on the other were
forced to demonstrate their instrumental, social benefit in solving
various ills identified by New Labour if they wanted a slice of the pie.
Warnock and Wallinger have selected source documents to assist the
arts to find a position.
Beautifully designed and full of facsimiles of fascinating policy
documents as well as invited polemical texts and artworks submitted
by current artists and commentators, Art for All is an incredibly
useful compendium on the minefield surrounding State ideology
and the arts, especially with regard to instrumentalism: funding arts
to fulfil a social engineering agenda.
The central tenet is that there is no such thing as neutral State
funding. Art for All includes documents which track how the Arts
Council was founded and why, and how various policy changes have
impacted on the arts, artists and audiences over the years.
You can read original documents outlining the Arms Length
Principle, established by the Arts Councils founder John Maynard
Keynes, which was a mechanism to avoid direct governmental
control over the aims and content of art. The Arms Length Principle
meant that funds come directly from the Treasury to an independent
Arts Council which itself decides what is art and what is not, and who
is deserving of funding. There is no Ministry of Culture in the arms
length model. Thats the whole point: government ideology is kept at
arms length from culture, and government places direct trust in the
experts. However, the book also provides testimony to the problems
with this: that it can be and has been dominated by a closed circle of
the great and the good who move in the same circles and share the
same values, invited onto the Council by each other to decide what
art is.
Keynes himself believed, paternalistically, in the great and the
good. He believed they were empowered to be stewards, to know
what was quality and what was not. But he also argued that there is
nothing but danger once a Ministry of Culture is established, tasked
with interpreting government policy through the arts. His generation
had witnessed the results of this in the Soviet Union, and in Germany
under the Third Reich, which albeit extreme examples, show how
things can go once the State has this kind of power. Three years
after the founding of the Arts Council, Orwell published 1984. The
LADA Study Room Guide
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they want. Some take the money and run, and many others resist
being coopted: they protest, refuse to participate, withdraw. Various
artists and theorists in the volume refute completely the notion
that art can be owned or controlled by the funder. Others argue the
opposite. Browsing Art for All is a useful reminder that at the same
time as some of us are fighting the current cuts, State arts funding
is in itself not necessarily a good, and that arts funding is a constant
site of struggle. While focusing on the Blair years, the questions in
Art for All can be applied to any regime, and the reproduction of key
policy documents usefully reveal how State cultural power operates.
Did I say its beautifully designed?
Arms Length Principle and
#2 The
the Arts
Harry Hillman-Chartrand and
Claire McCaughey, 1989, American
Council for the Arts, http://www.
compilerpress.ca/Cultural%20
Economics/Works/Arm%201%20
1989.htm
LADA Study Room code: A0465
16
artists would lead to further assaults on State support for the arts in
the 1990s.
The value of this chapter today is that the four models and their
underpinning analysis still stand, even if the countries cited have
changed. In fact, it is fascinating and instructive to see how different
national models have changed because of changing politics. As
mentioned earlier, Britain was a pioneer and champion of the Patron
model from its founding in 1946 and had spread this model to the
Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand
where it still stands. But as we have seen, Keynes feared Ministry of
Culture was brought in under a right-wing Tory party in 1993.
Reading this short chapter will help you think ideologically and
systemically about sliding scales of public and private funding.
Where do you stand? If you were born and brought up elsewhere or
have lived and worked abroad, how did it work there? What model
fits with both your politics and your aims as an artist?
Which moves us into tackling business and corporate sponsorship.
LADA Study Room Guide
18
20
In their essay for A&B, they assert that Goods and services are no
longer enough; what consumers want today are experiences memorable events that engage them in an inherently personal way.
But in a world increasingly filled with deliberately and sensationally
staged experiences, consumers choose to buy or not buy based on
how real they perceive an offering to be.
LADA Study Room Guide
22
24
#4 Free Exchange
Hans Haacke and Pierre Bourdieu,
1995, Polity Press
LADA Study Room code: P1741
4. Free Exchange
If you read one thing, read this. If you can read two things, read this
and Using Art to Render Authenticity above, back to back.
US-based artist Hans Haacke and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
first published this highly readable conversation on the impact
of sponsorship and censorship on the arts in 1995. This era, as
mentioned above, was a decade of furious struggle in the USA over
ethics, federal funding, censorship, and private sector sponsorship,
and sets a vivid context for their exchange. Haackes art practice is
to take on and unpick systemic structures of power - be they State,
business or culture - and reveal them through visual/sculptural
interventions, subversions of signs and codes. Bourdieus is to create
analyses of how power operates, and his ideas on cultural, social
and symbolic capital, and symbolic violence have influenced a
generation.
Haacke may have been more quiet of late (he is nearly 80), but his
many infamous pieces affronted and disrupted the artworlds closed
circuits in the 1980s and 90s. For example, Metromobiltan (1985) and
Freedom is now going to be sponsored - out of petty cash (1989) were
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Culture: Corporate
#5 Privatising
Art Intervention since the 1980s
Chin-Tao Wu, 2003, Verso
LADA Study Room code: P1757
28
30
32
34
Incoporated: Museums,
#9 Culture
Artists and Corporate
Sponsorships
36
For more on Live Art and direct action, please see In the Footnotes of
Library Angels: A Bi(bli)ography of Insurrectionary Imagination, a LADA
Study Room Guide by John Jordan. [10]
APPENDIX
Since the Study Room Guide was originally published in 2012,
Platform and Live Art Development Agency ran a Reading Group
to discuss the texts that the Guide featured. The group of 10 to 15
people from the arts, activism, and academe met four times at the
Agency, in two-hour sessions, over May and June 2012.
The group discussed The Arms Length Principle by HillmanChartrand and McCaughey; Using Art to Render Authenticity in
Business an Arts & Business publication by Gilmore and Pine; an
extract from Free Exchange by Haacke & Bourdieu; and Arts Council
Englands Catalyst Arts Strategic Philanthropy Fund.
LADA Study Room Guide
38
The discussion ranged freely from these texts starting points, and a
feel for this is indicated by the Take the Money and Run? Tumblr site
[11] where members of the group uploaded links, ideas, and news of
events and actions during the period of the Reading Group.
The Reading Group was an experiment to animate Live Art
Development Agencys excellent Study Room Guide series through
live discussion. Members of the group fed back very positively.
Especially appreciated was the range of participants, all interested in
politics, and concerned at the increasing corporatisation of culture
but coming from different viewpoints. Additional relevant texts were
proposed and added by Reading Groups members, and since the
end of the group, more new texts have been added:
Bakshi et al (2009) Measuring intrinsic value - how to stop worrying
and love economics.
DCMS (2010) Letter from Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture
Media and Sport, to Liz Forgan, Chair, Arts Council England, on
Spending Review.
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Commentary
guardian.co.uk/culture/culture-cuts-blog/2011/jun/29/arts-fundingphilanthropy
guardian.co.uk/society/2000/oct/11/fundraising.guardiansocietysupplement
Research Tools
ethicalconsumer.org/researchservices/ethicalpolicydevelopment.aspx
corporatecritic.org
corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=58
platformlondon.org