The arts should take the oil money and be grateful to get it

AMONG its many lively claims to a place in history, the summer of 2024 will surely come to be known as the one that finally killed corporate sponsorship of the arts.

- Martha Gill

Last month a group of literary festivals divested themselves of Baillie Gifford, a company that had helped fund them for decades, for the crime of being some two per cent invested in businesses related to fossil fuels. And now South Kensington’s Science Museum has sacked a big sponsor of its own: Equinor, a Norwegian oil company.

It feels as if some final wall of resistance has been breached. The Science Museum has until now a record of standing up to activist pressure, as corporate partnerships fell elsewhere: in recent years The Tate, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Shakespeare company have all shed sponsors on moral grounds. But now the museum has deemed Equinor to have failed to limit its carbon emissions sufficiently, and it will no longer take its filthy lucre. What, now, for philanthropy and the arts? Is this new purity test really what we want?

Let’s get three things out of the way. Any reasonable person must accept that climate change is our biggest challenge, that polluting companies should face consequences, and that climate activism has been essential in pushing us towards a greener world.