UK arts funding sits on a three-legged stool of public investment, commercial revenue and support from philanthropists and corporate sponsors. The system offers diversification should one source fall short and limits any undue influence on artistic decisions. But right now, all three legs are starting to wobble, and people fear a collapse.
The double whammy of a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis is putting increased pressure on arts organisations, but they cannot simply hike their prices for paying visitors. The UK is rightly proud of its free national museums and efforts to keep prices controlled and accessibility high.
Meanwhile, not only has national and local arts funding declined over the past decade and a half, but many organisations who receive it complain of unreasonable bureaucracy. One arts organisation manager recently told me they were contemplating renouncing grants from Arts Council England because the applications, reporting and interference into the institution’s agenda cost them more in man hours than they were getting back.
What is left? Although I am an ardent advocate for philanthropy, it is well documented that the UK’s wealthiest are less generous than their US counterparts. A 2010 survey by Barclays Wealth found that 41% of US millionaires had charity as one of their top three spending priorities, compared with only 18% in the UK. Another report found that Brits with £1m to £5m in investable assets at their disposal gave a median of just £4,480 last year.
And now, major corporate sponsors are increasingly being targeted by campaigners and activists. The group Fossil Free Books (FFB) recently made headlines with its demands for the investment management firm Baillie Gifford, a leading sponsor of UK literary festivals, to divest from oil companies and Israel. What happened instead was the withdrawal of its funding deals with a series of book festivals and art galleries, exposing the fragility of corporate sponsorship and the lack of viable alternative solutions. Baillie Gifford’s support for the Borders Book Festival helped to provide free events for schools and free books for thousands of children. This will now, seemingly, end.
FFB’s case against Baillie Gifford is that it has £2.5bn to £5bn invested in the fossil fuel industry. Yet that is only around 2% of its assets under management, and far below an industry average. Campaigners also claim the firm has “nearly £10bn invested in companies with direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries”, citing a £5.4bn stake in Nvidia and a £4.3bn stake in Amazon. The reasons they give? The Israeli government and military uses their services. But don’t we all? By this logic, should we boycott Toyota because their pickup trucks are the favoured brand of terrorist groups around the world?
FFB organisers said their focus on Baillie Gifford’s literary sponsorships was a strategy to leverage change and “not about moral purity”. Yet the fallout from the boycott likely makes no difference to Baillie Gifford but deeply harms the charities it had supported for years.
While obvious reputational art-washing by certain donors and companies should be fought against, we must recognise that the world is not black and white. The puritanical approach of campaigners and activist groups only creates a nervous environment, such that other potential corporate sponsors will see the arts as not being worth it. They’ll spend their money somewhere else, thank you very much.
The arts remain a soft target precisely because we care about them—nobody would be throwing soup at a Monet if it didn’t spark headlines and outrage. But who is prepared to stand up for arts funding in the UK? We need leaders who will champion and defend arts organisations with the same passion that campaigners and activist groups fight their causes. Directors of institutions need to own their positions of responsibility and authority in society, as should artists, writers and creatives.
Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate since 2017, recently commented that she had started to understand that, as a leading art museum, Tate is “supposed to be the authority” and that it’s “more useful not to be frightened of your expertise, while also accepting that others will want different positions and views.” That’s a start.
• Leslie Ramos is a philanthropy and strategy advisor specialised within the arts and cultural sectors. She is the co-founder of The Twentieth, an international arts philanthropy agency, and the author of Philanthropy in the Arts: A Game of Give and Take, published by Lund Humphries
