{"id":1464,"date":"2015-02-03T18:20:23","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1464"},"modified":"2015-02-03T18:20:23","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T18:20:23","slug":"building-brands-ruining-reputations-laura-gascoigne-on-the-tate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1464","title":{"rendered":"Building brands, ruining reputations – Laura Gascoigne on the Tate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothing is too squalid for Brand Tate, argues Laura Gascoigne.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcChange the name and not the letter, change for the worse and not the better,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ran the old wives\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 saw on choosing a husband. Nowadays, in the wider world of consumer choice, a change of name is almost always a change for the worse. Whenever a familiar product is rebranded, a deterioration in quality is guaranteed. And when a corporation renames itself, as sure as eggs is eggs (assuming one can still be sure of that) it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s up to no good.<\/p>\n

Last July, there was suppressed hilarity in media circles when multinational accounting firm Ernst & Young announced that henceforth it would be trading under the snappier acronym EY. Unhappily, some in the press pointed out that the initials adopted by the company to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153demonstrate boldly and clearly who we are\u00e2\u20ac\u009d were confusingly already in use by another entity, the junior beefcake magazine EY! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or Electric Youth!, to give it its full name \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a publication equally unafraid to demonstrate boldly and clearly what it is. A typical cover on its website features teen model Sergio Carvajal lifting his Spain 2012\/13 Confederations Cup football shirt with one hand while pulling down his pants with the other, alongside the cover line: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe beauty and joy of young boyhood\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the male equivalent of nubile? Pubile? Anyway, you get the picture.<\/p>\n

Commentators remarked that it was odd that a firm like EY2 that employs 167,000 people hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t done its research before changing its name but not its letters. The reason is, it was in a hurry. The name change came just four months after the then E&Y was persuaded by US criminal prosecutors to reach a $123m settlement with the IRS for marketing tax avoidance schemes that cost the US economy $2bn in lost revenue between 1999-2004. The dodges, dreamed up by a unit called VIPER \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Value Ideas Produce Extraordinary Results \u00e2\u20ac\u201c included fake investments with names like COBRA \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Currency Options Bring Reward Alternatives \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for the creation of which four of the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s magic bean-counters were sent down in 2010.<\/p>\n

A spokesman for E&Y quickly announced that it was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pleased to put this matter from a decade ago behind us\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but unfortunately matters didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t end there. When top executives from Amazon and Google were hauled before our own Commons Public Accounts Committee last November for a grilling by the terrifying Margaret Hodge as to how they got away with paying almost no taxes, the schemes allowing them to do so, it transpired, had been hatched by er\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the erstwhile Ernst & Young. Before people with long memories started to cast their minds back to the collapses of Anglo-Irish Bank and Lehman Bros and to recall the identity of their auditors, a nifty change of name was obviously in order.<\/p>\n

Where\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all this heading? In case you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t noticed, Tate Modern\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s big autumn exhibition is being marketed under the title The EY Exhibition \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Paul Klee: Making Visible. Why, oh EY? Because in July, within days of their name-change, EY signed a three-show sponsorship deal with Tate Modern, publicized in a wince-inducing press release picturing the Tate director and the EY chairman standing shoulder to shoulder with matching business suits and rictus grins, one without a tie (creative industries), one with (creative accountancy). \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This collaboration between two internationally-recognised institutions,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the release announced, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153has the potential to help build a better working world for their visitors and clients respectively and the communities in which they work.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Take your fingers out of your throat, because it gets worse. It ended with this assertion from the EY chairman: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The arts and services sector can make a significant contribution to building brand Britain.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Building brand Britain? I bet Paul Klee had no idea when helping to design a brave new world at the Bauhaus that his name would be posthumously linked with such a preposterous piece of corporate jingoism, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t suppose he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have been best pleased about it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obnoxious. There may be a respectable tradition of calling lecture series after distinguished scholars, but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing respectable about flogging a dead artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arse to a dodgy firm of accountants and allowing them to brand their initials on it. The Tate would do better to get EY! to sponsor the gents toilets and at least encourage some active philanthropy while they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re at it.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for the survival of old familiar unbranded Britain, there are signs that a rebellion against brandalism is brewing. In September the felicitously named Russell Brand loosed a well-aimed volley at the GQ Men of the Year awards \u00e2\u20ac\u201c where he was collecting an award as an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcoracle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c when he stood on a stage papered in the logos of the event\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sponsors Hugo Boss and pointed out the absurdity of the fact that German outfitters who supplied uniforms to the Nazis were still trading as a fashion house under the same name, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and the ludicrous necessity for an event such as this to banish such a lurid piece of information from our collective consciousness.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He may cultivate the appearance of Edmund Blackadder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sexier younger brother, but Brand is more than just a pretty face. He earned his \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcoracle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 award, in spades.<\/p>\n

To the innocent observer, the shocking thing about these you-scratch-my-brand-and-I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll-scratch-yours relationships is how openly they are conducted. When accepting sponsorship money stolen from the taxpayer, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d think a public institution would want to keep it quiet. But the Tate is so intoxicated with its own brand that it seems to have lost all sense of propriety. At the risk of turning really green at the gills, visit the Corporate Support page of the Tate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s website and watch it flogging its own arse to prospective sponsors as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one of the best-loved brands in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 central to the UK\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cultural vibrancy, an agenda-setting arts organisation internationally [which] regularly features in industry round-ups of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccool\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfavourite\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 brands. Choose a Tate exhibition,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it coos, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and together we can build a package to mirror your brand, ethos and style\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. But if Tate is really such a favourite brand, shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it be in a position to set conditions and bury EY\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s involvement in the usual small print? Now that it has rolled over and given EY top billing, every corporate sponsor will expect the same treatment. If anything, their demands will escalate.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be this way. Four years ago the then director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Timothy Potts, forfeited \u00c2\u00a380,000 of funding towards the acquisition of Marcantonio Bassetti\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Dead Christ Supported by the Virgin and Mary Magdalen when he refused to display the Art Fund\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s naff new pink heart logo on the label \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a logo The Burlington Magazine thought more appropriate to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a mail-order firm for adult lingerie\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Potts agreed to a credit line, just not the logo. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Logos are the currency of marketing and commerce,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and this introduces a promotional element into galleries that we regard as an unnecessary and unacceptable distraction.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The museum lost the picture but kept its dignity. There were no hard feelings: the Art Fund helped the Fitzwilliam (with Potts still in post) to raise the \u00c2\u00a33.9m needed to acquire Poussin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Extreme Unction last year.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Margaret Thatcher. When an art institution accepts the currency of marketing and commerce, it risks losing its heart and soul along with its dignity.<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0\"\"<\/a>Laura Gascoigne<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jackdaw, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing is too squalid for Brand Tate, argues Laura Gascoigne. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcChange the name and not the letter, change for the worse and not the better,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ran the old wives\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 saw on choosing a husband. Nowadays, in the wider world of consumer choice, a change of name is almost always a change for the worse. Whenever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75,38],"class_list":["post-1464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne","tag-tate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1467,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions\/1467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}