In Australia, a recent sponsorship decision of the Sydney Biennale
is testing the relationship between the government, arts organizations, artists
and sponsors.
As government investment is
eroded and ticket sales cannot keep up to the rising cost of producing arts
events, increasingly organizations are turning to corporations for help with
the bottom line. While many productive partnerships between large companies and
non-profit corporations exist, navigating the fine line between a good
partnership and a partnership that will alienate the artists and audience can
be tricky.
A prime example is the recent
uproar in Australia over Transfield Holding’s sponsorship of the Biennale of Sydney. Transfield is a company that is
contracted by the Australian federal government to supply facilities to the
Manus Island Detention Centre, where asylum-seekers are sent to await
processing. Outrage over the
partnership led to boycotts by artists and eventually a mutual termination of
the partnership.
The government was unhappy
with the decision. George Brandis, the Minister for Arts,
wrote to the Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts, Rupert Myer, “At
a time when government funding for the arts is, like all demands upon the
budget, under pressure, it is difficult to justify funding for an arts festival
which has announced to its principal private partner that it would prefer not
to receive its financial support.”
He added, “Equally appalling is the fact that the board of the Biennale,
apparently under pressure from certain individual artists, has decided to
decline to accept funding from a generous benefactor, because of the political
opinion of those individual artists, concerning a matter which has nothing to
do with the Sydney Biennale.”
Essentially, the minister told the arts
community that beggars can’t be choosers.
He worried that the controversy would send the wrong message to other
corporations who would withdraw funding in fear that an artist would boycott
them and draw attention to an unpleasant aspect of their business. It is almost as if he thinks that
corporations only support the arts as a way to distract the public from what
they really do.
Here in Canada there seem to be far fewer of
these tenuous relationships.
Corporate sponsorships, undeniably, are part of the art funding
landscape. For the big companies,
it offers the opportunity to expose large audiences to your brand, build your
philanthropic image, and usually comes with some free marketing. For the arts organizations it provides
the funding necessary to pull off a season that would otherwise be difficult to
do without outside money. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the
Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada and the Sponsorship Report have been
paying attention to the growing industry of corporate sponsorships and have
been put in place a policy of best-practices.
Thankfully, we haven’t had a minister tell the
arts sector that beggars can’t be choosers, though artists and arts
organizations should have the power to choose their sponsors. Most organizations have a mandate that
goes beyond the creation of their art and they should be given the power to
partner with a sponsor that fits with that mandate. Individual artists can, and should, think independently, and
if they feel they are being used for propaganda, their art will likely
suffer.
MC
