Complaints in Wonderland

There was an an article in The Observer by Mark Lawson “How will our museums survive if they subject every donor to to an ethical audit?” (24th March 2019) that drew attention to the ethical angst, dichotomy and perhaps hypocritical nature of arts patronage amongst established institutions. The industrialist Sir Henry Tate was the early benefactor of the Tate Collection. Tate’s fortune was founded on the importation and refining of sugar, a commodity inextricably linked to slave labour in the Caribbean.(Reference, www.antislavery.ac.uk). The British Museum is full of artifacts purloined from around the world. The problem is the there is no policy for the arts in the United Kingdom, a policy that would ask where are we now; where do we want to be and how are we going to get there? An intrinsic part of the national arts policy should be an ethical policy so that funded organisations can be held to account.