CLEANING UP THE ARTS

Words by Nix Herriot

To perform at this year’s Darwin Festival, you must not speak out publicly about the festival’s sponsors. Contracts require artists and producers to guarantee that they will not “take any action which may disparage the festival and/or its corporate sponsors”. This gag clause was likely added after First Nations singersongwriter Leah Flanagan criticised the festival’s main sponsor, oil and gas giant Santos, at the 2018 opening concert. Her comments against fracking were met with audience applause as campaigners demanded that the festival cut ties with companies involved in fossil fuel extraction. Santos has been the target of particular anger over projects that go against the wishes of traditional owners and promise massive greenhouse gas emissions. “We will not accept arts and cultural institutions being used as a vehicle for the promotion of fossil fuels,” artists explained in an open letter to the festival organisers.

The relationship between the Darwin Festival and Santos is emblematic of the ways in which fossil fuel companies use cultural institutions to clean up their public images. In her 2015 book, Big Oil and the Arts, artist and activist Mel Evans refers to this process as “artwashing”.

Debates over artwashing have gone some way towards exposing the myth of art’s ‘neutrality’. From the bloodsoaked sugar empire that gave its name to the Tate galleries to indigenous artefacts looted from the colonies, art has long been shackled to capital. In recent years, cultural institutions have been no strangers to political controversy. In 2018, the National Gallery of Victoria dumped its contract with Wilson Security following protests over the company’s links to offshore detention. Earlier this year, over 100 artists withdrew from the Sydney Festival in opposition to its sponsorship deal with the Israeli embassy. And just last month, hundreds of teachers condemned Adani’s patronage of London’s Science Museum. “These sponsorship deals are not altruistic acts,” the teachers wrote, “but part of a wider strategy by fossil fuel producing companies to convince the public that they are the ones solving the climate crisis, rather than the ones creating it”.

The issues raised by dirty sponsorship are almost as old as the arts itself. Artists have long relied on the patronage of the wealthy and the wealthy have long relied on artmaking to boost their social standing. Similarly, corporations have always portrayed themselves as giving back a little of the immense wealth they extract. Initially, Mel Evans explains, money was spent to undermine the power of organised labour.

Companies like Standard Oil “pledged financial support for social projects as a way to move social acceptability out of the hands of unions and into the palms of the bosses”. During the Cold War, mining giant BHP positioned itself as the standard bearer of progress and prosperity, carrying the message of free enterprise into Australian schools, universities, churches, homes and workplaces.

As unions lost power, however, boardroom strategy evolved from combatting the influence of labour to increasing spending on public relations. At a time of growing disquiet about climate change, fossil fuel companies increasingly recognised a need to manufacture a social licence to pollute. In the early 2000s, Shell described its need for a global reputation management agenda to “build, maintain and defend Shell’s capital”. Shell and other oil majors have known the stakes of global heating for decades yet continue to wage million dollar lobbying campaigns to obstruct climate action.

With their logos emblasoned on most major galleries and museums, fossil fuels are part of the furniture of cultural life. Neoliberalism has turbocharged the bonds between the arts and business by evaporating government funding and grants. “My hands are so filthy,” said former Art Gallery of South Australia director Ron Radford when asked about funding acquisition. For donors, arts sponsorship allows them to associate themselves with a progressive agenda when their activities are anything but. As early as 1967, David Rockefeller described the value of arts in “providing a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation and an improved company image”.

A local example of artwashing is the Art Gallery of South Australia’s annual Tarnanthi festival of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Tarnanthi’s lucrative $17.5 million sponsorship deal with BHP allows the company to cast itself as a good corporate citizen, offering an enlightened smokescreen for exploitation. BHP has blasted Aboriginal sites in the Pilbara for a quick buck, operates the world’s second largest uranium mine and is promising a massive gas expansion. In 2015, the company ignored safety warnings about the risk posed by its Samarco dam - a decision that led to Brazil’s worst environmental disaster. For BHP, association with a festival of indigenous art is an effective way of cleaning up its toxic reputation for what is effectively loose change. And when BHP sponsors Tarnanthi, Tarnanthi likewise sponsors BHP.

Artwashing cleanses the tailings, oil slick and coal dust from exploitative social relations. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a disaster that killed 11 rig workers and pumped some 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, major cultural institutions like Tate helped to rehabilitate BP’s brand. “You can’t abandon your friends because they have what we consider to be a temporary difficulty,” lamented gallery director Nick Serota. Brand management is clearly important for capital. Arts sponsorship, Evans writes, “offers a pretence of corporate responsibility for the callous profiteer; and becomes an illusionary act of cultural relevance for outmoded industries”.

Dirty sponsorship has nothing to do with philanthropy. It’s a cheap form of image laundering for destructive companies. Given that big fossil fuel giants pay zero tax on their Australian operations, despite windfall profits during the current gas crisis, they are pinching far more from the public purse than they are “giving

back”. All the while, a culture of fossil fuel dependency and silence remains devastating for artists who are given little choice but to associate their works with extractive industries.

Fortunately, arts workers and their unions have been vocal in calls to clean up the arts. Protesting at the Louvre in the wake of the Paris Agreement, artists and climate activists joined forces to demand a “fossil free culture”. The Royal Shakespeare Company, Van Gogh Museum, Edinburgh Festival and other organisations have recently ditched their partnerships with companies like BP and Shell following creative protest campaigns. The carbon majors are feeling the pressure of a broader climate movement. The head of Europe’s coal lobby complains that his industry is “hated and vilified in the same way that slavetraders were once hated and vilified”.

At its best, art has the potential to be an agent of meaningful social change. As the impact of the climate emergency intensifies, more must be done to target cultural institutions that are, as novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it in her resignation from the British Museum, “collaborating with those who are unmaking the world before our eyes”. Either the arts embrace the challenge of decarbonisation or they continue to sanction and sanitise the behaviour of those fuelling the fire.