Time to kick Oil out of Football? – The Economic War, part 3
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Mar 23, 2022
Roman Abramovich under sanctions! Chelsea up for sale! Scandal engulfs Everton FC as a key donor Alisher Usmanov is added to the UK government’s list of ‘named Oligarchs’. The Economic War has opened a new front on the pitch. Football is pulled into the Russian invasion of Ukraine just as Western corporations and the oil...
BP’s sponsorship of Tate is over!
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Mar 11, 2016
Today is one of those days when we know we’re winning. It emerged that BP’s sponsorship of art gallery Tate will end within a year. Until this morning we didn’t know whether Tate would be signing a new deal with the oil company, locking it into fossil fuel promotion for a further 5 years. But in a victory for cultural divestment,...
After nearly three years of legal struggle, is Tate going to shed light on BP sponsorship details?
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Sep 15, 2014
On Thursday Tate is going to be appearing before the Information Tribunal over their lack of disclosure about conversations around BP sponsorship and about the amount of money that they’re getting from BP.It’s in Tate’s interest for people to think that it couldn’t possibly survive without BP’s dirty money, but we don’t think that’s true....
Art in the face of climate change – Deller, detachment and William Morris
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May 12, 2014
Recently I gave a short talk followed by a lengthy discussion in a ‘Green Drinks’ forum organised by Artsadmin at Toynbee Studios in Whitechapel, London. The audience was comprised mainly of people in the arts engaged with ecology, and people in the ecological movement engaged with the arts. The text of the talk ran as...
A Temporary Difficulty? The Tate Modern audio tour revamp
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Apr 25, 2014
Guest blogpost by Phil England. It was four years ago this week that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded while drilling into BP’s Macondo oil well, killing eleven people. In a report issued last week, the National Wildlife Federation records that over 900 bottlenose dolphins have been found dead or stranded in the area since...
Time for Tate to stop being so shady over BP sponsorship
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Apr 4, 2014
We’re a more open organisation than any equivalent organisation in the world… —-So said Nick Serota back in 2008. More open than the National Gallery, for instance, who took three weeks to reveal its £30,000 /year sponsorship deal with Finmeccanica to Campaign Against the Arms Trade? Or how about the Natural History Museum, who took...
Take the money and run? New piece by Platform on arts and corporate sponsorship in Arts Professional.
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Jun 11, 2012
Read the piece here. We welcome any comments. Arts Professional is a leading national bi-weekly news and analysis magazine for arts managers, fundraisers, and policy-makers. AP invited Platform to write this after reading the Study Room Guide of the same name which Live Art Development Agency commissioned from Platform earlier this year.
Damien Hirst appropriated our work!
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Apr 3, 2012
The new Damien Hirst retrospective which opens tomorrow 4th April at Tate Modern has forced a last minute revision of our BP themed alternative audio tour. The Hirst exhibition appropriated the floor space which contained Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (see picture below) one of the featured artworks in our Tate à Tate audio tour. This...
Tate Soundscape Hijacked by Artists
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Mar 20, 2012
BP’s environmental record is appalling yet many people are prepared to turn a blind eye to the fact that Tate is in bed with BP, one of the “ten worst corporations’’ based on its environmental and human rights record. A new series of artworks questioning Tate’s relationship with BP has been commissioned by three activist...
Social Licence: Complicity in the Age of Extraction
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Mar 14, 2012
At first glance, there might not seem to be an obvious common ground between indigenous activists in Canada, performance artists in the UK and climate activists in both countries. However, the international controversy over Canada’s tar sands industry in northern Alberta has galvanised individuals from all these communities into new cooperative relationships opposing the developments....
‘Tate à Tate’ Launch Party 23.3.12
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Mar 8, 2012
Tate à Tate, the audio tour is ready to launch – on Thursday 22 March it will be available to download for free. On Friday 23 March, Platform, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil invite you to come and celebrate the audio unveiling of this participatory piece of interventionist sound art.
Arts Council to embed sustainability into its funding
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Feb 24, 2012
Last week I gave a talk at the State of the Arts Conference in a parallel session on Artists & Our Future Environment. What was inspiring about that session, the one that followed in the afternoon, and the general discussion around the conference, was just how many people were talking about how the arts can,...
