BP announces five more years of sponsoring the arts

Controversial British “supermajor” oil and gas company BP has announced a new sponsorship investment of £7.5million over the next five years, continuing its long-term relationship with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House.

The partners in the scheme cite such partnership as key to the scale and longevity of bringing art and culture to the people, at a low price. Both the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery are free to visit as publicly funded non-departmental public bodies, although their blockbuster exhibitions partially funded by BP are paid and ticketed; BP and Royal Opera House offer schemes of free tickets to screenings of performances, while RSC and BP run a scheme for 16-25 year-olds to access £5 tickets in London and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Nevertheless, sponsorship of art institutions by big oil conglomerates has long come under intense public criticism and scrutiny.

Protests, boycotts and performance activism are a common occurrence, such as last September when activist group BP or Not BP staged a day-long protest and 15 mass-performances in the great court of the British Museum. And in May, Greenpeace scaled the front façade of the museum, rebranding its new exhibition Sunken Cities an underwater archeological exhibition about two lost Egyptian cities as Sinking Cities using imagery from areas recently affected by flooding like New Orleans, Manila, the Maldives and Boscastle and Hebden Bridge; Greenpeace holds oil companies accountable as agents of climate change.

“At a time when funding for public institutions is increasingly stretched, the support of the arts that BP provides is vital,” says Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery says. While Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum says: “BP has supported the British Museum for the past 20 years which has enabled the museum to host magnificent exhibitions and events with a great public benefit.”

Likewise, the sponsor BP says: “Our long term commitments ensure that new performances, special events, exhibitions, awards, grants, lectures, and access to works of art can continue to reach an ever-growing audience, bringing art into the public domain in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without BP’s investments."

Yet, a freedom of information request and court battle lead by Platform London, an art activism group alongside Leigh Day and Monckton Chambers law firm and Request Initiative, revealed last year that “BP fees accounted for under 0.5% of Tate’s budget between 1990-2006,” going on to criticise the partnership.

Platform London campaigner Anna Galkina says: “BP’s pocket change buys it legitimacy and access to invaluable advertising space. Sponsorship masks BP’s role in destroying indigenous lands, arming dictatorships, and wrecking our climate. These deals cannot be allowed to go on for another five years, that’s why art interventions and protests will go on.”

The latest news comes only months after BP and Tate announced an end to their 26-year sponsorship, which the oil company cited to an “extremely challenging business environment”, rather than years of protest. Such culminated in a mass sit-in at Tate Britain last November, and a highly organised protest event Deadline Festival that called for a termination of the partnership through exhibition, film projection and the “seed bombing” (by throwing sunflower seeds into the soil) of Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Empty Lot installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in December of the same year.