Who owns a public institution? In an ideal world, the answer to this question would be everyone: you, me, our next-door neighbours, our children’s children.
As a society, we are becoming increasingly interested in cultural ownership, an idea that can be seen throughout the arts sector: with the Arts Council’s vision of Great Art and Culture for Everyone seeping into the national consciousness, we are increasingly attached to the idea that art belongs to the public.
As a cultural principle, this is laudable: it means that galleries and museums are open for free, orchestras play concerts in parks, you can buy a ticket to the theatre for £5. However, it also creates one of the most contentious issues in fundraising: that the public should have a say in where organisations get their money. Scandals in the past year have cast a spotlight on fundraising practise and, in the cultural sector, this has focused on corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Those of us who are artistically minded are prone to taking poetic licence when we talk about this. It’s all too tempting to cast companies like BP as the Svengali leading the innocent Tate/British Museum/Royal Opera House astray, the wolf pretending to be grandma. It’s satisfying to moralise like this, but it’s not always useful, and can lead to oversimplification of complicated, genuine problems. Rather than pointing fingers, what we should do is ask ourselves a question: what good does distrust of big business do to the sector?
It is often tempting to think of the cultural and corporate sectors as existing in a dichotomy, as polar opposites. This is due to a pervasive, but out-dated, understanding of how arts organisations are and should be funded. The popular idea of projects and institutions being bankrolled by single, wealthy patrons is long-gone, replaced by layers of Trusts and Foundations, individual gifts and corporate sponsors. In its romanticising of cultural institutions as inhabiting a non-business space, the public holds its galleries, theatres and museums to a higher standard than almost any other industry.
Arts companies are not morally superior to the need to fundraise, but because they are supposed to belong to us all, they are held to unique standards. What good does this do? What say should the public have in how its institutions fundraise? And – because the concerns underlying some sponsorship arrangements are completely valid – how can arts companies fundraise ethically?
A fundamental principle underlying the answers to these questions is that sponsorship is not philanthropic: it is transactional. It must be understood that both parties enter into the agreement as willing and equal participants: each stakes risks and each stands to gain. This is no one-way street: cultural institutions should never be so beholden to their sponsors that they allow them to dictate their activities.
Additionally, the value of holding cultural institutions to high standards is clear: it helps to ensure that they are acting in the public benefit as far as possible. However, the more complicated problem here is that of trying to establish where the public benefit lies.
Is it in demonising morally dubious industries like oil, tobacco and arms? Or is it in providing beautiful art, music and theatre to the public at an affordable cost? What is difficult is striking a balance between the two: organisations must take responsibility for deciding where on this spectrum their fundraising policy lies.
When it comes to the level of involvement the public should have in defining public institutions’ fundraising policies, there is again an issue of public benefit versus institutional discretion. Whilst, on the one hand, it is important that protest groups like Art Not Oil are given platforms to air their (legitimate) complaints, on the other when they threaten the ability of institutions to remain open to the public (as happened recently at the British Museum), they run the risk of making victims out of the same organisations they hope to protect. If we cannot place trust in our most highly valued cultural institutions to make their own decisions, we should surely question why we value them so highly anyway.
So, how can institutions fundraise ethically? The answer can be found, somewhat anticlimactically, in the guidelines established by the Museums Association, which uses as one of its three pillars ‘individual and institutional integrity’. Independence is vital to arts organisations: a flourishing society rests on the shoulders of diverse, honest art.
In order to ensure the independence of thought, we must protect our cultural institutions from becoming so beholden to funders that they can no longer produce this, but the same is true of the public’s involvement.
What is important is for arts organisations to own themselves: to define their own ethical fundraising policies, using a wellconsidered rationale, and to take responsibility for their own integrity.
