Back on track

The Stage, 26/8/10

At one point, it looked like the Edinburgh Comedy Awards might not happen. Until Foster’s stepped in. Simon Tait explains why corporate support is becoming increasingly important to the arts

Edinburgh 2010 and the fringe is as bouncy, bumptious and bountiful as ever, with the comedy as raw and edgy as we have come to expect.

But only a few months ago, there seemed no certainty that the 30-year-old fixture in the fringe firmament, the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, would be a part of it this time. So there was quite a party at the beginning of the summer in Joe Allen’s in the West End to celebrate a new sponsor.

It was with child-like glee that the West End producer and theatre owner Nica Burns, inventor of the awards that bore the Perrier name for 26 years, announced that Fosters, the lager people, were taking it on. ‘A natural fit,’ she said, beaming over coffee and Danish. ‘Comedy is in our DNA,’ chuckled the Fosters man, Dave Jones.

While other lager brands are plastered over football of different forms, this one is turning to the other thing lads like to do. Well, the other other thing, laughing.

But for such a perfect fit, the sponsor had been elusive. Perrier’s immediate successor was an Edinburgh banking concern, Intelligent Finance. So, for three years we had the IF Comedy Awards. Then IF, part of HBOS, caught a serious ague in the credit crunch and withdrew leaving Burns in an unfunny situation. Last year, she had to sponsor the awards herself.

Fosters is part of the Heineken global marque, and Heineken UK is based in Edinburgh. The commitment is for a nominal three years contractually, but Dave insists they’re in it for the long term.

To listen to the government, though, you’d think sponsors like Fosters/Heineken are a thing of the past. The future of arts funding, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt believes, is in ‘philanthropy’, and some sponsors have even taken to using the word to describe their business association with arts organisations, which are clearly not philanthropic.

Hunt made proselytising philanthropy one of his five priorities for his first month in office, after Schools Olympics (results to be announced in September) and before Broadband (to eradicate ‘not spots’). Last month, he reported on his blog: ‘Have written to top 200 donors to cultural organisations to thank them and am currently looking at how to make it easier for cultural bodies to raise funds. The current financial environment makes it essential to improve both our culture of giving and also our culture of asking, both of which arguably suffer from our very British reluctance to talk about money’.

If don’t ask, you don’t get.

He has filled his diary with one-to-one meetings with potential donors to the arts, no civil servants and no lawyers present, as he does personal research into how we can emulate the American system of giving, as he prepares to slash 25%-40% from the arts subsidy. And he may be not be diverted from his course by the letter signed by Sir John Ritblat, Anthony D’Offay and other philanthropists saying that their money is not meant to replace subsidy, they give it to add to the national subvention. As Vikki Heywood said, the RSC is worth £58m a year to the West Midlands, more when the new theatre is finished at the end of the year, and philanthropy is simply not a serious option there.

The truth is that business sponsorship is not dead, and Fosters is far from alone in stepping forward. In fact, the last published figures from Arts & Business showed that business sponsorship did, indeed, decline last year – by 6%, a percentage point less than the fall in philanthropic giving to cultural concerns and projects. Business sponsorship was still worth £157m, a quarter of the private sector contribution, which takes into account trusts and foundations as well as philanthropy.

In the last month or so, the likes of UBS, HSBC and Shell have all announced new cultural sponsorships, and most managing and working in the arts are praying that the demonstrations against BP by the self-styled Good Crude Britannia artists’ alliance (particularly angry about the oil company’s support of the Tate who were celebrating 20 years of their association) won’t scare off them or any of the other corporates who help keep the machinery of the culture industry running fairly smoothly.
Meanwhile, the poor, beleagured British Film Institute, its plans for a Southbank National Film Centre in ruins after the new government pulled the £45 million personally pledged by Gordon Brown and bewildered as to what the abolition of the UK Film Council will mean to them, had something to smile about. American Express have stepped forward as principal sponsors for an undisclosed but, says director Amanda Nevill, ‘very substantial’, amount.

The fact is that many, if not most, philanthropists are also the industry moguls that sanction the sponsorship of the likes of, say, Unilever, without whose business support Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall exhibitions could not happen, or Travelex whose £10 tickets have now notched up a million happy National Theatre goers. And the Arts Council’s own calculation shows that 75% or more of arts philanthropists are giving their money in London: in the regions, theatre companies and venues simply dare not believe that philanthropy will replace subsidy, or that corporate sponsorship is a thing of the past.

Art is organic, the funding of it cannot be. By all means woo the generous rich to give, but philanthropy is uncertain while it is the well established process by which businesses see commercial sense in being associated with culture that puts a smile on the face of the arts.