While BP say the decision to ends its Tate sponsorship is unrelated to climate protests, museum industry insiders say campaigners are having an effect as they turn the spotlight on the ethics of corporate funding

BP’s decision to pull the plug on their sponsorship of the Tate is a milestone in the campaign to make fossil fuels a toxic brand, and not the first.

Last November, the Science Museum announced that it would not renew an agreement with Shell, after revelations that the firm had tried to influence its presentation on climate change.

Corporate sponsors have become more important for museums and arts institutes since the economic crisis began cutting off public funding sources.

Some £410m a year of museum funding now comes from wealthy patrons, with the Tate gallery group alone taking a £180m slice of that pie in the UK.

Sources in the museum industry say that this can pose an ethical dilemma, especially when it is augmented by the more practical problem of ‘brownwash’. Fossil fuel firms may hope to gain an image boost from associating with the arts scene but this can all too easily come with a nosedive in reputation for the arts institutions themselves.

BP to end Tate sponsorship after 26 years Read more

“The protests have gradually had a grinding-down effect on the Tate,” one source in the museums industry said. “The campaign was targeting the kinds of people who go to the museum – so-called ‘special audiences’ - and I would imagine that these protests will have got to them and thrown doubt into their minds.”

A fossil fuels-arts world divorce was “the way the world is moving,” the source said.

Although the decision to end the Tate’s sponsorship arrangement was reportedly taken by BP because of an “extremely challenging business environment”, campaigners and arts industry sources believe it was also influenced by war-weariness at the Tate.

BP’s donations to the gallery were “embarrassingly small” – no more than £224,000 a year on average – and the Tate group may have felt that they no longer offset the baggage that came in tow. If so, the writing could be on the wall of other well-known tourist attractions.

Campaigners say that most big cultural institutions in London now take funding from fossil fuel firms and three big names – the British Museum, Royal Opera House and National Portrait Gallery – will be deciding whether to renew contracts with Shell and BP in the year ahead.



In 2011, BP agreed to give these three institutions – and the Tate - £10m over five years. Anna Galkina, a campaigner with Platform London, said that the next protests would target the British Museum.

She told the Guardian: “There will be all sort of interventions there, and the campaign on the other two institutions will definitely ramp up too, now that we know that it is winnable.”

The Liberate Tate campaign is a model for these pushes, and was born out of a workshop that the arts activist John Jordan gave at the Tate called ‘Disobedience makes history’ in 2009. Folklore has it that he was told he could speak about anything except actions against the Tate’s sponsorship arrangements – and so turned the workshop into a discussion of whether to confront the Tate.

“There is always a turning point when a certain form of culture is seen as toxic and unacceptable,” Jordan told the Guardian. “At some point in the early 19th century the slave trade was no longer perceived as business as usual but a violent inhuman practice. Our cultural perception of the fossil fuel industry is now at a similar turning point - and not a minute too soon!”

