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Ties between the UK's cultural and scientific institutions and oil companies have been thrown into the spotlight due to revelations that a corporate sponsor tried to influence a museum's language on climate change.

Thanks to emails acquired by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act we now know that oil-company Shell asked the Science Museum to take into account specific recommendations about its Climate Science gallery.


The emails revealed:

Shell's own climate change advisor David Hone (a former oil trader) made recommendations on what should be included in The Atmosphere Gallery, a project designed to educate the public about global warming.

The Science Museum's former director Chris Rapley criticised Greenpeace's successful campaign to make Lego drop its partnership with Shell.

Discussions took place between Shell and the Science Museum about how the institution should react to criticism from Greenpeace.

Shell expressed concern that one of the Science Museum's projects could give NGOs an opportunity to criticise its activities.

The company also wanted to ensure that an event the museum was planning was invitation-only in order to "proactively" ensure that the topic of its sponsorship was not opened up to debate.

The Science museum told the Guardian that "not a single change to an exhibition resulted from these email exchanges".

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The revelations do, however open up the country's museums and their sponsors to increased scrutiny.

Even without the possibility that oil companies might be trying to unduly interfere with exhibition content or management, their involvement is frequently criticised. The Art Not Oil coalition works solely to end oil industry sponsorship of the arts, while Artwash, a recently published book by campaigner Mel Evans, describes oil companies sponsoring arts and culture as "cynical PR".


The relationship between the Science Museum and BP is far from being the only controversial partnership in between big companies and the arts right now. Other current exhibitions and galleries you might want to know about include:

Shell is sponsoring the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery

BP has provided sponsorship for the National Gallery's Portrait Award from the past 25 years.

Both BP Shipping and Shell Shipping sponsor the National Maritime Museum

Currently on at the British Museum is The BP Exhibition: Indigenous Australia enduring civilisation. BP's funding commitments towards the museum have been extended until 2017.

Boeing, maker of weaponry and military aircraft that include bombers, fighter jets and attack helicopters, is a current sponsor of the Afghanistan Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.

The Science Museum's Who Am I? gallery, which explores the characteristics that make us human is sponsored by pharmaceuticals conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline. GSK also supports the Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre.

Pharma company Bayer UK has supported current exhibits The Old Operating Museum in London

The Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photography of the Year, which for many years supported by Shell, is now being sponsored by DONG Energy, which made a controversial deal with Goldman Sachs in 2014.

The Natural History Museum also makes money from consultancy work and training it carries out within the oil industry with a whole list of publicly acknowledged companies.

The Tate continues to receive sponsorship from BP, despite frequent protests from activists and members.

For several years the Tate was under pressure from arts organisation Platform to reveal exactly how much BP was spending on sponsorship. In late 2014, it was forced to give up those details thanks to a ruling by an Information Tribunal: what was finally revealed was that BP's sponsorship of the Tate was worth £150,000-330,000 per year, just a tiny percentage of the Tate's overall income.

Protesters have used this as evidence to argue that the Tate does not need BP's oil money, and therefore should not take it. They argue that BP is getting more out of being associated with the Tate than the Tate gets from them. In another respect, it demonstrates in specific terms that artistic and cultural institutions aren't as reliant upon individual corporate sponsorship deals to survive as one might presume.

Similarly, at a time that arts funding is declining, corporate sponsorship is more important than ever; many have argued the benefits that large multinational sponsorship of the arts provides for the institution, the morale of employees and the country at large.


Cultural commentator Tiffany Jenkins has spoken out against the critics, saying that the arts need all the help it can get from corporates. She adds that much of the "public" money institutions receive also comes with strings attached. "The arts have been supported by oil money for a long time (just think of John Paul Getty) and by others keen to improve their reputations, such as the Medici family of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Big Oil, as campaigners like to call it, isn’t the only major business interest that supports the arts today. Arms companies sponsor galleries and arts festivals. The Nobel Prize (and its money) comes from Alfred Nobel, who was an arms manufacturer," she writes.

Jenkins even goes so far as to suggest that we should not insist upon transparency from museums about their funding. Recent events somewhat counteract this argument; the fact that we can use Freedom of Information requests to scrutinise the relationships between cultural institutions and their powerful sponsors are one way of ensuring that oil companies, pharmaceuticals and arms manufacturers are not able to overstep the mark.

Just as in publishing, corporate sponsors will want to promote their brands against subjects their activities are related to -- in this case, the environment. And just as in publishing, the ethics of negotiating the relationship between corporate input and editorial or curatorial integrity are tricky and will always rely to a certain extent on trust. If there are opportunities for scrutiny however, institutions should be open to it, and prepared to justify their positions without hesitation.