The arts world can’t afford the price of purity

Right now, the activists targeting Barclays’ sponsorship of summer music festivals are celebrating.

After bands threatened to boycott events supported by the bank – which invests six-figure sums in festivals staged by promoter Live Nation, including Download, Latitude and the Isle of Wight – amid pressure over its links to defence companies supplying Israel, it opted to pull its support for the cultural fixtures of our summer.

The activists, put simply, have won.

It must be nice to live in a lofty world where staff intimidation and the vandalism of Barclays branches are a just means to an end and the grubby issues of funding can be disregarded. You can’t get stuck in the weeds with that stuff.

But as they polish their halos, I wonder how many of these protesters have thought ahead to next year, to the simple mathematical equation BBC DJ Liz Kershaw was forced to lay out for them on Twitter/X on Saturday: “No sponsor = no festival. Bullying of bands = no festival.”

The same equation applies across the arts world – a world which, incidentally, has seen a dramatic decline in government funding over the past 15 years and been left battered by the pandemic.

In 2019 Hay Literary Festival’s main sponsor, the conglomerate Tata, pulled out after being accused of harming poor communities in India. But relief at the securing of a new sponsor was short-lived. It turns out that the Scottish asset manager Baillie Gifford also failed to pass purity tests.

Best known for its early investments in Tesla, the company was forced to pull its funding after it was accused by critics of profiting from fossil fuels and links to “Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide” – aka defence firms, which as Barclays (accused of the same ethical violation) has explained, are “an essential part of keeping this country and our allies safe”.

In another coup for protesters, Baillie Gifford has now cancelled all of its remaining deals with literary festivals. It’s now hard to imagine why any company would put themselves through the ethical wringer for arts festivals in the future.

After all, the sponsorship of major events is only a worthwhile marketing strategy if it shows businesses up in a good light, and you have to wonder who, in 2024, would be considered “pure” enough to fund the arts?

It would, of course, help if there were an actual, literal, purity test that potential funders could be made to sit. Does your board meet the necessary diversity targets? Has it met those targets throughout its history – I mean, from day one? Because nowadays morals are backdated, retrospective, and “we no longer behave like that” is no defence.

Do you or have you ever employed someone who has behaved badly? Never mind that in a globally interconnected economy, everything is linked to everything, can you, hand on heart, swear that you have never had “links” to anyone, or anything, deemed to be problematic?

Perhaps drawing up a vast document outlining all the potential ethical violations a sponsorship company might be guilty of is the answer. In which case, let’s get the protesters to sit through that same purity test, shall we? Let’s quiz them on their “links”, however tenuous.

Since social media tends to be their moral guide, the bible from which they learn right from wrong, I’d like to know who makes the devices they’re glued to? Apple has been known to hire US lobbyists who work with those “devilish” fossil fuel companies, as has Google and Microsoft.

X has been found to incentivise violent content. Time and again Meta has been accused of harming children’s mental health and failing to protect its young users from sexual exploitation. Amazon has been regularly sued for workplace abuse, discrimination, and maltreatment of workers. Where do all these violations figure on activists’ ethical barometers?

One of the greatest characteristics of Gen Z is their ethical backbone; the way they hold people and companies to account.

I certainly wasn’t thinking about those things at their age, and young people should be idealistic – but not to the point that it eclipses practicality and rationality.

Not if it means an inability to understand the bigger picture. Not if the whole concept of “commerce” is to be seen as dirty, if the arts world is to be sacrificed and we are to be left with a culturally barren landscape.

Nobody has put it better than Sir Ian Blatchford, the director of the embattled Science Museum, who back in 2022 saw the way the wind was blowing and warned: “If the arts world is not careful, it will be eaten alive by its own piety.”