{"id":1968,"date":"2018-02-10T19:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T19:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1968"},"modified":"2021-01-13T14:57:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T14:57:03","slug":"laura-gascoigne-dirty-money-and-plenty-of-it-september-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1968","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Dirty Money and Plenty of It – September 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Laura Gascoigne
September\/October 2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and remarking in surprise: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What, both in the same grave?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic Sa\u00c3\u00afd, a contributor to Boris Johnson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leadership campaign, described in the press as an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153arms dealer and philanthropist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. What, both in the same skin? You may recall the Syrian-Saudi financier as the fixer behind the notorious 1980s Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the investigation into which by the Serious Fraud Office was quietly dropped under Tony Blair in 2006. To salve what he has in the way of a conscience, Sa\u00c3\u00afd likes to make charitable donations: a bit to the Royal Shakespeare Company, a bit to the Science Museum, a massive whack to Oxford University for his eponymous business school. Last year he funnelled \u00c2\u00a3340,000 to the Tory party through his British wife Rosemary; the bung for Johnson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leadership campaign was in her name, while their son Khaled supported Rory Stewart. Hedging your bets, as it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s known in camel racing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No complaints from the Electoral Commission: politics is a dirty business, where dirty money is the norm. Higher standards are expected of culture, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think why. Wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Alfred Nobel an arms manufacturer? And the Hunting Art Prize ticked along happily here for a quarter of a century despite the sponsor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rumoured involvement with nuclear weapons and cluster bombs, before decamping to the land of the free and the Second Amendment in 2006. (Your correspondent even sat on the judging panel and received a case of wine for her services, which she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t choke on.) But now that cultured folk seem to have forgotten that lucre is filthy, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting as jumpy about sponsorship as a passel of cats on a hot tin roof. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One campaigning group calls itself \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcCulture Unstained\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Culture unstained, eh?  I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been racking my brains for a major arts sponsor, from Cosimo de\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Medici on, whose hands have not been stained with dirty dealings of one kind or another. Lucre is filthy, and art depends on it. But this rather obvious fact seems to have escaped campaigners against BP\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sponsorship deal with four of our major cultural institutions: the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Opera House. The focus of recent attacks has been the NPG\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Portrait Award, taken over by BP from John Player in 1989 when tobacco staining was considered the greater evil. (The RA, incidentally, still accepts \u00c2\u00a345,000 a year from Japan Tobacco International, which supported its 2009 exhibition of Anish Kapoor. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The BM has also been quietly taking JTI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s yen for acquisitions for its Asia Department. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s apparently OK to accept money from foreign tobacco companies; we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care if the Japanese die of cancer as long as our NHS doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to pick up the tab.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to BP. So far the NPG and the BM have stuck to their guns, or pumps, though how long the RSC will hold out after Mark Rylance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ostentatious resignation from the company is another question. In June Rylance announced that he did not wish to be associated with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153anyone who wilfully destroys the lives of others\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Nor, I believe, would William Shakespeare.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite a claim to make on behalf of someone who lived through the Elizabethan era of colonial expansion and legalised piracy, but on climate change, perhaps, the bard was blameless: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shall I compare thee to a summer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s day? Though art more lovely and more temperate than global warming.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summoning the spirits of dead artists in support of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cause is an interesting gambit. I doubt Van Gogh would have been overjoyed at having his recent exhibition at Tate Britain branded with the initials EY, but short of appearing like Banquo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ghost and spooking VIP guests at the private view by parading his bandaged ear among the canap\u00c3\u00a9s there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a lot he could do about it. With living artists, though, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another matter. In November Nan Goldin twisted the NPG\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arm by refusing to go ahead with a planned exhibition unless the gallery dropped its grant from the Sackler Trust, the philanthropic arm of the owners of the drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma currently facing lawsuits in 35 US states for pushing its addictive painkiller OxyContin across America. Goldin has appointed herself the avenging angel of OxyContin addicts, fronting the campaign that drove the Met to sever its ties with the Sacklers in May. Now the repercussions are being felt over here, though it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not our problem, and the stink of opioids is overpowering the smell of petrol. Having held the line on BP, in February the NPG\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s newly formed ethics committee drew it at the Sacklers, who gracefully withdrew their grant \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to avoid being a distraction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for which read \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to avoid more bad publicity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Yes, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such thing as bad publicity but no, no one in their right mind wants to pay for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Word has it that the NPG were shamed into action by the plucky little South London Gallery, whose trustees under the chairmanship of Frieze founder Matthew Slotover returned \u00c2\u00a3125,000 worth of Sackler funding the month before. Now the gauntlet has been thrown down to Tate Modern, V&A Dundee, MK Gallery, the Ashmolean, the RCA, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Science Museum, the Royal Museums Greenwich and all other recipients of Sackler generosity \u00c2\u00ad\u00e2\u20ac\u201c the list of shame is as long as the tracks on a junkie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arm. Woe to any institution that, like the Serpentine, has the Sackler name affixed in Roman capitals to its entablature; it cannot shed it without the family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s permission. While not wishing to be a distraction, the Sacklers may well balk at being erased from history without seeing a penny of their money back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been a tough year for the Serpentine all round. In June its CEO Yana Peel was forced to resign over her husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s partnership in Novalpina Capital, a private equity firm with a stake in the cyber security group NSO linked to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Peel didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go without a fight, complaining of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bullying and intimidation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153toxic personal attacks\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c none quite as bad as being dismembered with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the eve of your wedding. In her resignation statement she threatened: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If campaigns of this type continue, the treasures of the art community [the community, note, not the art] \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which are so fundamental to our society \u00e2\u20ac\u201c risk an erosion of private support.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. While there are donors in search of redemptive publicity, support will continue. What no one mentions is how small the sums involved are. The real scandal is not that our cultural institutions are selling themselves for dirty money, but that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re selling themselves dirt cheap. The BP sponsorship deal at the root of all the fuss is worth \u00c2\u00a37.5m, split between four institutions over five years. On the scale of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbig oil\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, this is peanuts. Before staining our culture with dirty money, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at least make sure there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plenty of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Gascoigne September\/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and remarking in surprise: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What, both in the same grave?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[742,75],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","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=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1969,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}