Three cheers for the British Museum, which has just announced a new £50 million sponsorship deal with the oil giant BP. The news is a surprise because oil and gas companies are increasingly treated as lepers by the culture sector. The Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Tate are just some of the elite organisations that have shamelessly abandoned longstanding funding relationships with BP following pressure from environmental campaigners. The British Museum deserves credit for standing its ground when few others have dared.
The museum says the ten-year deal, believed to be the biggest in its history, will help to kickstart its £1 billion master plan to refurbish and redisplay its permanent collections. Its grade I-listed building is also in urgent need of renovation. In a clever move, the museum released polling it commissioned, which suggested 59 per cent of the public were in favour of museums accepting donations from the oil and gas sector, and preferred corporate donations over taxpayers’ money. A useful riposte to the claims of environmental activists that the public is overwhelmingly on their side. Charlie Mayfield, a trustee and chairman of the museum’s master plan committee, said they were grateful to BP for the support – and who can blame him when such an enormous sum of money is on offer?
The British Museum must be prepared for a long and potentially ugly tussle with campaigners
The museum’s decision to stick with BP matters because of the important broader message it sends out. The institution is one of this country’s most revered cultural bodies: what it says and does has a ripple effect across the cultural sector. The unseemly rush across the arts to bin much-needed financial support from the fossil industry amounts to a form of institutional suicide — at a time when other means of support are declining or non-existent. What’s more, there appears to be very little public appetite for more taxpayer support to remedy the funding gap. That is why private sector funding is so critical.
It won’t be plain sailing. The British Museum must be prepared for a long and potentially ugly tussle with campaigners angered by its refusal to buckle to their demands. They don’t give a hoot that the museum is merely being loyal to a company that has supported it since 1996, sponsoring numerous high-profile exhibitions. It also funded the BP Lecture Theatre in 2000.
Eco-activists will stop at nothing to make their displeasure known through noisy boycott campaigns and other stunts. The museum’s leaders will soon find themselves the target of countless celebrity environmentalists who have developed a sideline in demanding an end to oil sponsorship of the culture sector. Their hatred and disparagement of these companies is absurd in itself but rendered more ridiculous in that it never seems to stop them from flying around the world to attend some protest or other. Nor do they pause to consider any of the practical consequences of their demands for the arts sector they claim to love so much. Their posturing and moral grandstanding amounts to a recipe for bleeding arts institutions dry of independent financial support. Without corporate sponsorship, what future is there? To this existential question, the activists have no real answer. It is all about ‘making a stand’.
The British Museum is right to resist the siren calls of this ragtag army of eco-campaigners who insist that they alone are entitled to pass judgment on who, or what, passes their moral purity test as a potential funder of cultural organisations. Let’s hope that it marks a long overdue end to an embarrassing and demeaning period in which our elite cultural organisations have far too hastily succumbed to one of the great hysterias of the age, the eco-doom movement and its assertions that any money from the fossil fuel industry is beyond the pale.
The museum will have a new director soon, possibly as early as next summer. It faces stiff challenges in dealing with the political fallout from the rows over the Elgin Marbles as well as the theft of more than 2,000 priceless treasures from its collections. Make no mistake though: its ongoing financial ties to BP may turn out to be the ugliest and most vicious battle of all.
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