Money for Old Art

Despite the purported football-free nature of this blog - a quote from last night’s Spain v Portugal match: “The collective brains of football came together to score that goal.” So, as much consolidated cerebral engagement as an average A* GCSE pupil then – which is not saying much. Some of the dives were worthy of Mark Spitz playing Yorik for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford,

A bunch of ‘artists’ has slated Tate Britain for accepting sponsorship from BP, which has been sponsoring the arts for 20 years. They penned a letter to the Guardian, a UK newspaper well known for its socialist agenda.

The letter claims that sponsorship programmes of companies like BP and Shell are "means by which attention can be distracted from their impacts on human rights, the environment and the global climate. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations.”

Signatories (not that I’ve ever heard of a single one of them) include playwright Caryl Churchill, cartoonist Martin Rowson, comedian Robert Newman, artist John Keane and electronic musician Matthew Herbert. I wonder how many of them drive cars or use oil or gas to heat their homes. Until they don’t they are being total and utter hypocrites suffering from an unhealthily large dose of self-righteous indignation and cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, don’t most artists paint in oils? They may be vegetable oils, but all oils are organic in origin.