{"id":1460,"date":"2015-02-03T18:17:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2015-02-03T18:17:31","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:17:31","slug":"mind-the-funding-gap-laura-gascoigne-on-neds-and-philanthropy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1460","title":{"rendered":"Mind the funding gap – Laura Gascoigne on NEDs and philanthropy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may have been the heat, but in the lead-up to the summer recess accusations of conflict of interest were flying around Whitehall like frisbees. First the PM\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Aussie electioneer Lynton Crosby was outed as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco just as the government announced its decision that plain cigarette packaging represented a danger to public health until proved otherwise, then it was revealed that a trio of Neds advising the government sit on the boards of companies with interests in fracking.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNeds\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, in case you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know, are Non-Executive Board Members brought in to make government ministries more business-like (no, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know government ministries were glorified boards either). There are 60 of them advising the Coalition, and three of them have been giving off a whiff of shale gas. One of the three, Lord Browne of Madingley, sits within the Cabinet Office as Head Ned.<\/p>\n

Lord Browne has an interesting CV. A former Group Chief Executive of BP (1995-2007), he is now chairman of Cuadrilla, the fracking company whose hydraulic probing of Lancashire was blamed for earth tremors that toppled traffic lights in Blackpool in 2011. With the blessing of our \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgreenest government ever\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, Cuadrilla has since shifted its drilling interests to West Sussex. Watch out for belisha beacons in Bognor.<\/p>\n

Browne is a cultivated individual. While at BP, where he developed the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arts sponsorship programme, he was a Trustee of the British Museum and he is currently Chairman of Tate Trustees. The perfect person, one might think, for the Art Fund to invite to address a July gathering of art world grandees at the Royal Society of Arts on the theme of A New Age of Philanthropy? in the wake of the Chancellor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s announcement in his Spending Review of a 5% funding cut for national museums in 2015.<\/p>\n

But as Head of the Whitehall Neds and chair of the Tate Trustees, Browne is himself a walking conflict of interest. Had he been sent in by Osborne with the anaesthetic trolley to desensitize the patient in advance of cuts? The nervous tension among the distinguished audience suggested that they had their suspicions, which Browne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hints about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a new balance between state funding and philanthropy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and the need \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to create the right space for private philanthropy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d did nothing to dispel. The usual way of creating space being to remove things, Penelope Curtis \u00e2\u20ac\u201c on a signal from Nicholas Serota \u00e2\u20ac\u201c asked the direct question: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Are you advocating that public funding should be less?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and received the less than direct answer that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the state should be providing for things that are improvements to the state\u00e2\u20ac\u009d such as free admission, education, cultural diplomacy and conservation. An attempt at a joke \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Imagine if we outsourced the care of collections to Serco!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c got a hollow laugh. Nor were nerves particularly calmed by Browne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s response to Neil MacGregor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proposal that philanthropy be taken out of party politics \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How are you going to do that?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with the free-market mantra: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Government should probably get out of the way of making choices and let the so-called market get on with it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Help.<\/p>\n

A stack of Art Fund booklets on the entrance desk explained the tax advantages of Acceptance in Lieu and the new Cultural Gifts Scheme to prospective donors, and Browne talked about the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153right incentive structures\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153non-monetary recognition\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, even proposing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a period of super-incentives\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to ease British tightwads into the pledging habits of rich Americans. He held up the example of Andrew Carnegie, who invested 90% of his wealth in cultural causes during his lifetime, but neglected to mention that in his Gospel of Wealth Carnegie explicitly advised philanthropists against relinquishing control of their money to charities with no guarantee of how they would spend it. He would presumably have bristled at the small print in the Art Fund booklet advising those planning bequests of works that, in the event of the charity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being unable to present them to appropriate institutions, they could be sold \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and the net sale proceeds\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 used in or towards the purchase of another work of art for a museum or gallery\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

Super-incentives would not have had no appeal to a man who praised the British system of high inheritance tax by which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaires\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 unworthy life\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Ahem. Philanthropy, in Carnegie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s day, still meant love of your fellow man rather than tax-incentivised amour propre. Even in the 1940s, when the Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian offered to leave his Old Masters to the National Gallery in return for tax breaks, he was considered a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slippery benefactor\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and refused. Now slippery benefactors are actively courted. If the Israeli shipping magnate Eyal Ofer was prepared to pour another \u00c2\u00a310 million into Tate Modern\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overextension, who was going to dig up allegations that his late father Sammy sold an oil tanker to a blacklisted Iranian company? This was an Ofer the Tate couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t refuse. It has made its Great Bed of Ware, now it must lie in it and not be picky about its bedfellows.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that too many of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s high-net-worth individuals see \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnon-monetary recognition\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 as a way of reversing damage to their reputations. They are not always particularly knowledgeable about or interested in art. Those who are, meanwhile, are making their own arrangements. A new philanthropic phenomenon Browne omitted to mention is the sudden rise in private galleries opened by collectors: four in London in the past six years. Anita Zabludowicz, Alex Sainsbury, David Roberts and Frank Cohen are all philanthropists who slipped the state art net because, like Sainsbury (whose father funded the Sainsbury Wing) they find the public model of patronage \u00e2\u20ac\u0153too passive\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and want to control what they buy and show. Their galleries may not be quite the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcspaces for philanthropy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Lord Browne has in mind, but their motivation is undeniably philanthropic: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to single out contemporary artists who have been left by the wayside,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Cohen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words, and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to test art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s purpose outside the marketplace\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Sainsbury\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something our public galleries can no longer be relied on to do. Plus they want their collections on show rather than in public gallery storage. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not fair on young artists to have their work hidden away,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Zabludowicz.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to mock DIY magnate Frank Cohen as the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSaatchi of the North\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no denying his artistic enthusiasm. Like the other three DIY galleries I visited, his unpretentiously converted space in the old Express Dairy near St Pancras is a heartening reminder of how things were before the state muscled in on contemporary art. On a Wednesday afternoon three months into the run of its inaugural John Armleder show, mine was the first name in the visitors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 book, but if the public doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t share Cohen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s taste in art it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nobody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s business but his. By the same token Sainsbury can freely confess of his Raven Row Gallery in Spitalfields that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153its cultural value is open to question\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, since he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to justify it to the taxpayer. In the week of my visit the four galleries\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 programmes were refreshingly different, representing a free-market ideal of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcchoice\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 no longer offered by most public galleries.<\/p>\n

No new age ever dawned by government diktat. If this is a glimmer of a new age of philanthropy, our Ned-led government should wake up to it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Laura Gascoigne<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jackdaw, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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