How to pick up a sponsor
Laura Gascoigne looks at the relationship between galleries and their corporate backers When Burne-Jones was forced to withdraw his Phyllis and DemophoOn from the Old Water-Colour Society exhibition in 1870 because of complaints about its hero's nudity, he resigned from the society in disgust: years later he was still cursing the British as 'the most cautious, hypocritical race on earth'. Seeing his DemophoOn now exposing himself with impunity in Tate Britain's exhibition Exposed: The Victorian Nude (reviewed on page 61) might look like proof that we are making progress. But cautious hypocrisy, it seems, still reigns, if not over the gallery-going public, then over the marketing and communications managers who hand out corporate sponsorship cheques for exhibitions.
As the inaugural show of Tate Britain's centenary development, The Victorian Nude should have been madly attractive to sponsors, but the Tate's development office failed to sell it. In the end, it was Tate members who picked up the tab and enabled the exhibition to go ahead. The Tate has put a brave face on it, but doesn't like to discuss it — for a development office there's a shame in not getting a sponsor rather like the humiliation of not hooking a husband. Asked why it happened, they say they were caught in a double bind: some sponsors didn't like the 'Victorian', some the 'Nude' and between the two it was a marketing no-no. Even in the 21st century, apparently, The Victorian Nude is the sort of girl you like to see but not be seen with, at least not by your business clients and their wives.
Corporate sponsorship of the arts in Britain is now worth £150 million a year and our galleries rely on it to mount major exhibitions. When Neil MacGregor recently told the press that next year's Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, funded by Barclays Bank to the tune of £350,000, 'would be impossible without their generous support', he wasn't mouthing PR pap; he was telling the truth. But our growing dependence in the age of PPP on corporations to provide exhibition funding raises questions about its possible impact on programming. Tate Britain can go it alone with The Victorian Nude, but couldn't support a whole family of sponsorship spinsters. Is there a danger that corporate tastes in art may start to affect our galleries' choice of exhibitions?
Absolutely not, says Paul Brown, head of marketing at cultural matchmaker Arts and Business. While corporations can reasonably expect arts events to fulfil their 'business objectives' in terms of profile-building, hospitality or branding, 'it's not in their realm to interfere with an artistic project'. Galleries, for their part, insist that curatori al and development departments are strictly separate — the curators conceive the shows, the developers sell them. But inevitably, admits a spokesperson for the Tate, 'market forces apply to selling a show to a sponsor' — for a big show of Matisse, Picasso or Monet, a gallery can pretty much name its price.
With development departments all chasing the same sponsors, competition between exhibitions is fierce. The Victorian Nude probably suffered from bad timing, coinciding with other heavy hitters, but its real undoing was its handicap in the 'brand identification' stakes. Brand ID requires an exhibition to reflect the qualities of its sponsor's business, or at any rate those its sponsor would like to project. Victorian values and nudity, understandably, come low on the corporate brand-identification wish-list. Instead the attributes most in demand from exhibitions are innovation (reflecting a forward-thinking, dynamic attitude), globalism (art that is both international and inoffensive to other cultures) and fame. In art these qualities might seem to be incompatible — innovative artists are unlikely to be famous and still less likely to be inoffensive — but this can be got around by backdating the innovation to the past. A case in point is the Surrealism show, for which Tate Modern took the precaution of instituting an obscenity policy but which still found a corporate sponsor in Morgan Stanley.
Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968, the Royal Academy's forthcoming blockbuster,
is another show with just the right cosmopolitan cut to flatter the corporate selfimage. While it has been snapped up by international investment bank Merrill Lynch, more awkward fits are left on the shelf. In a global contest, British art is the loser. Of seven exhibitions in the current British art season, three have so far failed to find sponsors: The Victorian Nude; Rachel Whiteread at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and George Romney at the Walker Art Gallery, the first Romney exhibition since the 1960s, curated by world expert Alex Kidson. Three more have had to scrape together sponsorship packages from a number of sources: Painted Ladies at the National Portrait Gallery; The Hickman Bacon Collection at Dulwich Picture Gallery: and Art on the Line (reviewed on page 60) at the Courtaukl, the most ambitious show in the gallery's history, for which it has raised funding from seven separate sources. Only one exhibition, Frank Auerbach at the RA, managed to hook a single corporate sponsor in International Asset Management.
Bernadette O'Sullivan, corporate development manager at the National Portrait Gallery, thinks the prejudice is not so much against British as traditional art. While she has had to fight off sponsors for fashionista Mario Testino's portrait photographs, the Romney show, coming to London after Liverpool, is proving 'challenging'. The future for funding specialist exhibitions, as she sees it, is for galleries to milk their blockbusters as cash-cows. But in an economic downturn, even blockbusters can be hard to sell.
'Corporate sponsorship is a dying market,' prophesies Jane Patterson-Todd, the new head of development at the Barbican, who came from a non-arts background at the Telegraph. 'Too many people are chasing the same corporations. There are only a certain number out there, and they have finite pots.' Her solution has been to go for more blatant 'brand sponsorship', working with companies such as Audi — sponsor of the recent Robin and Lucienne Day exhibition — to promote their products to the Barbican ABC1 25-44 audience. She feels the arts audience is too touchy about advertising: 'We forget that everyone's advertised to all the time.' What does she think of calling a car 'Picasso'? 'Not a good idea,' is her firm reply.
Her confidence is cheering, but in a culture where advertising has appropriated the word 'creative' there are obvious dangers in blurring the boundary between advertising and art. While the Barbican has stayed on the right side of the boundary, other venues with younger audiences have crossed it. Four years ago in its exhibition Assuming Positions the [CA screened the Blackcurrant Tango ad, without mentioning that the drink was manufactured by the exhibition's sponsors, Draught Bass. Now the Tate has been testing the branding boundaries by lending its name to a range of B&Q paints. The DIY giant reciprocated by sponsoring Tate Britain's 'challenging' Michael Andrews exhibition — British, not innovative and not famous — thus proving you can do it if you B&Q it. (To reassert its artistic independence, Tate Britain used National Trust paints for its centenary development.) Not all sponsors are as amenable as B&Q. Arts and Business hears constant complaints from corporate clients about the level of media recognition they get. There's pressure on galleries to include sponsors' names in exhibition titles as the only way to ensure they are not dropped — every mention of Tate Modern's Unilever Series guarantees a namecheck in the press. Although arts audiences are pickier than sports fans about adding sponsors' names to existing events, Paul Brown believes it's only a matter of time. Now we've got the npower Test and the Vodafone Derby, why not the B&Q Royal Academy Summer Exhibition?
The main reason why not, to use marketing-speak, is strategic. Branding is a twoway trade, and if galleries compromise the integrity of their brand by mixing it with paint and fizzy drinks, they'll lose the cachet that makes them attractive to sponsors and will be quickly discarded for something else. When that happens, they'll be terminally Tangoed and their loyal members won't be able to save them.
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