The Arts versus Business: Are Oil Companies The Right Sponsors For Museums?

A ‘flashmob’ protest against BP’s sponsorship of the British Museum in September 2015. Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images (sourced from The Guardian.com)

Much like any other young adult, one of the first things I do of a morning is pick up my phone to see what I've missed overnight. Although I'll firstly check social apps that help me connect with my friends and university peers like YikYak and Facebook; I also check Flipboard and the 'trending news' section of Facebook. Usually the hot topics are celebrity based, a part of popular culture that I find it hard to engage with. But, in my perusing this morning, the topic "the British Museum" was among those trending.
Being a History undergraduate, a frequent visitor to the British Museum, and the British Museum being the topic of my dissertation; naturally it caught my interest.

Upon further reading, it transpires that the British Museum is under scrutiny from the group Art Not Oil, for its corporate ties with BP, one of the British Museum's 28 corporate sponsors and members. The campaign for the British Museum to end its allegiance with BP has been running since September 2015, and has garnered support from prominent figures and celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo, Emma Thompson, Margaret Atwood, and shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

Art Not Oil is, in their words, a "cross-section of people - artists, cultural event and gallery-goers, environmentalists, human rights activists and others - who believe that oil company logos represent a stain on our cultural institutions." Founded in 2004, their belief is that by institutions allowing these companies to provide sponsorship to them, it endorses the use of fossil fuels and is false altruism to compensate for environmental damage, such as the infamous Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010.

Their stance is one that argues that oil companies are no longer the right sponsors for the Arts, due to the public's changing and increased understanding of fossil fuels and their impact on the Earth. They argue that just as tobacco companies are no longer seen as respectable corporate sponsors, oil companies such as Shell and BP no longer should be either.

While Art Not Oil's intentions are noble, it then follows that we should call into question the other 27 corporate sponsors of the British Museum. The other corporate partners include organisations such as Genel Energy, a gas and oil company based in Jersey; Japan Tobacco International (JTI); Goldman Sachs; and Merrill Lynch.

Art Not Oil's stance with regards to BP then becomes questionable due to the their lack of visible angst towards Genel and JTI - both of whom, in their own manifesto, are deemed unsuitable sponsors for an arts institution. Similarly, banking corporations such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have been fined and have come under scrutiny in the past few years for financial misconduct and the profit margins after being bailed out, respectively.

Does this mean that we, as the general public, should campaign for these corporations to end their sponsorship of the British Museum too, due to the increasing public understanding of banking corruption?

The British Museum, in Bloomsbury, London, was founded by Sir Hans Sloane with his personal collection of 71,000 items bequeathed to the public in his will in 1753, and is the world's first national public museum. It is now home to over eight million objects, has ten curatorial departments and provides Masters and short courses outsides of the events and exhibitions it holds for the public and members. As a charity registered organisation, it relies heavily on public donations and corporate sponsorship to keep its doors open for the 6 million people that visit each year.

While we do have a responsibility to maintain the planet we live on while developing in a sustainable manner, we also have a duty to preserve heritage - individual and global - for future generations. By dictating which organisations we deem 'appropriate' to sponsor and maintain our heritage, we are, effectively, choosing only to tell the best side of our story. And if we decide that every corporate sponsor of our arts institutions is unsuitable, we will be left with no arts to be able to enjoy. The British Museum does not endeavour to conceal cultures and civilisations in fear of its reputation being tarnished. So why should we expect BP to end its sponsorship of the British Museum just because they have been the perpetrators of a global atrocity too? While BP's sponsorship may be a way to assuage their guilt over the Gulf of Mexico incident, as Art Not Oil suggest, it is without doubt that their sponsorship and support is vital in keeping the British Museum open, and vital in allowing the public to even debate this issue in the first place.