Should the art world dump BP?

When the invitation arrived for Tate Britain's Summer Party, I didn't appreciate the irony in how the details for such a glitzy event were embossed on a chunky bit of recycled, eco-friendly grey cardboard. Neither did I notice that the evening was in celebration of something other than Fiona Banner's newly unveiled 'Harrier and Jaguar' fighter-plane sculptures. 'And 20 years of BP's support', came the almost apologetic words on the invite. That's generally how we like our corporate sponsors to appear: unassuming and discrete.

However, thanks to an activist group called Liberate Tate, the small print did not go unnoticed on the night, as guests were treated to two oil-bashing performances of 'License to Spill' (pictured above), in which gallons of tarry treacle were splashed down the steps and over the gallery floors at the besieged institution. It might have seemed that the protestors were aiming their anger at the wrong target, but then picketing BP's head offices is not as newsworthy as gatecrashing a VIP and opinion-forming party crowd at Tate. Besides, far from being reduced to a tiny green logo splat on the bottom corner of an exhibition poster, BP's sponsorship of the arts is now headline news.

A similar protest was staged outside the opening of the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Award last month, as well as at the British Museum last week, where molasses was poured in front of an Easter Island bust to 'represent the way in which civilizations once considered invincible can collapse in a short period of time'. All affected institutions have so far been stoic in their defence of up to two decades' worth of sponsorship from BP: 'You don't abandon friends because they have a temporary difficulty,' said Tate director Nicholas Serota in a recent interview. Indeed, if a newly fitted petrol cap puts an end to almost four months of Deepwater Horizon leakage, perhaps it will be back to business as usual for BP, although obviously not for the Gulf of Mexico fishermen and the already beleaguered Louisiana coastline.

We're not likely to forget this sorry episode in a hurry, however. It has highlighted the murky ethics behind corporate sponsorship of the arts, as well as the general murkiness of all funding, whether by government or rich individuals. It will make us look again at the BP-sponsored rehangs of the Tate collection, the latest of which includes Mike Nelson's claustrophobic installation 'The Coral Reef', which might now be reread as a disastrous oil rig interior or a metaphor for the slow suffocation of underwater life. If that sounds far-fetched, then what about the fact that Tate used to take sponsorship money from a builder of military weapons and attack gunships? That certainly changes my perception of Fiona Banner's decision to place two decommissioned fighter jets in the central nave of Tate Britain.

Even if Big Oil does join the ranks of arms and tobacco manufacturers as patrons non grata, we shouldn't assume that a corporate sponsor is harmless, just because they're not involved in killing the planet somehow. Art relies on this money to such an extent that its own ecosystem is being damaged by its acceptance. If a company pays half the costs for an exhibition, won't they automatically want a say in that show's content, outlook or presentation? Worse than a dialogue or a compromise, corporate sponsorship, at its most insidious, reduces art to a contractual obligation: thou shalt not mention the war, thou shalt not show nakedness, or tackle difficult subjects and so on.

When these agendas come to the fore of funding, then the price for showing public art for private gain will really be quantifiable. It won't end until our collections are pimped out to the highest bidder and our museums franchised across the world, because if Karl Marx is to be believed we're in a capitalist system that insists on 'the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone'. Next time, just be sure to read the fine print before you walk in to an exhibition.