BP or not BP?

For a moment there, we really thought it was over.

In June 2023, we had confirmation that BP sponsorship of the British Museum’s annual blockbuster exhibitions had come to an end and was not being renewed! In doing so, it joined the National Portrait Gallery and Royal Opera House, whose BP deals ended in 2022 and 2023 respectively.

We celebrated…briefly.

Then in December 2023, we learned that while the British Museum’s exhibitions would no longer be BP-branded, the museum had decided to continue working with the oil giant in a different way – by accepting BP sponsorship for the museum’s 10-year redevelopment plan. This presumably means that – while the BP logos have, happily, come down from the exhibitions – the oil company still has access to the museum’s facilities and will no doubt expect a certain amount of profile and PR in return for its £50 million of refurbishment spending.

The decision was immediately met with anger and disbelief from across the sector. As a time when nearly every other UK cultural institution was moving on from fossil fuel sponsorship, this seemed bafflingly out of touch. The new BP deal looked like a slap in the face to all the heritage professionals, curators, historians and British Museum frontline staff who had called for the end of the BP deal, and a shameless insult to all the communities on the sharp end of BP’s pollution, corruption, and climate breakdown, many of whom were the same communities whose colonially-looted items the museum was also refusing to return. As our friends from Culture Unstained said at the time:

 “This is an astonishingly out of touch and completely indefensible decision. It comes just days after delegates at COP28 agreed that the world must transition away from fossil fuels. We believe this decision is illegitimate and in breach of the museum’s own climate commitments and sector-wide codes and will be seeking legal advice in order to mount a formal challenge to it. 

“The only way you can sign up to a new sponsorship deal with a planet-wrecking fossil fuel company in 2023 is by burying your head in the sand, pretending the climate crisis isn’t happening and ignoring the almost complete rejection of fossil fuel funding by the cultural sector in recent years. The Board of Trustees have not fulfilled their legal duty to protect the Museum’s reputation as this new partnership will only damage it further.”

We’re still proud of the role we played in ending BP sponsorship of the British Museum’s exhibitions, removing those oily logos from the banners and adverts that plastered the museum (and nearby Underground stations) most of the year round, and taking away BP’s schmoozing opportunities with oil-rich regimes at exhibition launch parties. For more than a decade, we’ve staged nearly seventy mass creative actions in oil-sponsored spaces – including the British Museum – as part of a huge rolling wave of action by many, many people and groups that has driven the oil industry out of most of the UK arts scene, and helped turn public opinion against the fossil fuel industry for good. But of course – as ever – the work is not yet done.

The BP refurbishment deal feels like one last grasp at cultural respectability from an industry that knows it’s on the wrong side of history.

It appears that the decision did face internal resistance – one trustee resigned during the process, while another expressed her opposition to the deal in the media. Concerns were raised at the Board about reputational damage and the security costs of dealing with protests. But the museum’s management succeeded in pushing the deal through. The refurbishment plan is being driven by the museum’s Chair, former arts-slashing UK Chancellor George Osborne, who still has business links to BP.

The announcement of the new deal was snuck out just before Christmas 2023, receiving largely negative press coverage (apart from one glowing write-up in the Evening Standard – the paper that George Osborne used to edit).

Why did they do it? Following a decade of escalating protest and resistance against the BP-branded annual exhibitions, did BP and the British Museum hope that a contribution to the museum’s refurbishment fund would provide less of an obvious target for campaigners, and thus help them to avoid scrutiny?

If that was their plan, it hasn’t worked. Since the announcement of the deal, over 12,000 people have so far pledged not to work with or visit the museum. The institution has already been hit by two major protests by a new collective called “Energy Embargo for Palestine”, who first occupied the museum on February 11^th 2024. Their message was clear: “If you partner with BP we’ll shut you down”.

As the group explained in an accompanying article, BP is actively profiting from Israel’s brutal invasion in the wake of the October 7^th Hamas terrorist attacks, via new drilling licenses off the coast of Gaza. By partnering with BP, the museum has become complicit in this. A follow-up action outside the museum on March 24^th saw the museum temporarily close its doors to visitors. The group has pledged to continue its protests – and, of course, they aren’t the only ones…

Will the museum finally listen? After years of scandal over stolen artefacts, colonial display practices, oil sponsorship and internal theft from its collections, the museum clearly needs major reform from top to bottom. A new Director, Nick Cullinan is about to take the helm. In his previous role as head of the National Portrait Gallery, he responded to protests from artists, frontline communities and activists (including us) by ending the long-running BP sponsorship of the gallery’s Portrait Award. Will he also do the right thing at the British Museum?  

The British Museum, London Science Museum and Aberdeen Art Gallery remain the last major UK arts institutions to still have partnerships with fossil fuel companies in the middle of a climate emergency. It’s time for these outliers to finally catch up with the rest of the sector and stop propping up these deadly corporations.