How Sackler cash made museums a target for protests

VISITORS TO THE Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York witnessed an unexpected performance on February 9th. Dozens of activists who had been summoned by social media unfolded four red banners from the Guggenheim’s corkscrew balconies. In big black letters they read: “400,000 dead”, “200 dead each day”, “Shame on Sackler” and “Take down their name”. A cloud of white confetti was hurled from the top of the rotunda, each piece of paper a medical prescription.

The drug named in the prescription blizzard, OxyContin, is implicated in America’s terrible opioid crisis. Many states have filed lawsuits against its maker, Purdue Pharma, arguing that it bears some responsibility for thousands of deaths. On March 26th the firm settled a case brought by Oklahoma for $270m.

Purdue Pharma’s conduct is a problem for the Guggenheim and other museums because the firm is owned by members of the Sackler family, who are among the world’s biggest cultural philanthropists. Activists led by Nan Goldin, an art photographer who became addicted to OxyContin following an injury to her wrist, are trying to shame museums into turning their backs on the Sacklers’ money. She argues that the family ought to be paying for the treatment of addicts instead.

A few days after the Guggenheim protest, the campaign came to London. Ms Goldin told the National Portrait Gallery that she would boycott a prestigious retrospective of her work if the museum accepted an offer of £1m ($1.3m) from the Sacklers. By March 25th the Museum of South London had returned a gift from the family. The Tate galleries and the Guggenheim announced that they would no longer accept Sackler money. Ms Goldin threatened that another London gallery, widely believed to be the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), would be the target of her next protest. Dame Theresa Sackler, whose late husband was one of the owners of Purdue Pharma, has been a trustee of the V&A since 2011. Her family trust paid for the museum’s new £2m Sackler Courtyard.

The speed at which the campaign has moved is a tribute to Ms Goldin’s group, PAIN (“Prescription Addiction Intervention Now”). It also says something about museums in America and—especially—Britain. Because of changes to their funding, and because their mission has changed, museums have become far more vulnerable to campaigners.

Politicians have long smiled on museums. They have encouraged new ones to open, often hoping that they will revitalise neglected towns, as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao did in the 1990s. Since the financial crisis, however, state funding has become stingier. In the decade to 2017 (the latest year for which figures are available) public spending on museums and galleries in Britain fell by 30% in real terms. British museums are in a particular fix because the government has been committed to the idea that visitors should be allowed free entry to permanent collections. Even tourists from other countries get in for nothing. By contrast, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York faced a funding shortfall a year ago, it began charging visitors from outside New York State $25 each.

Small provincial museums have often dealt with the financial squeeze by cutting costs. But national ones have moved towards the American model, by soliciting donations from private and corporate donors—“a way for the rich to launder their souls”, as one director cynically puts it.

Museums trusteeships in America are a route to social advancement as well as a civic duty. It costs at least $10m to join the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and trustees are urged to give more. The Met’s 75 trustees have a combined worth of more than $50bn. “Give, get or get off” is the unofficial mantra of most American museum boards (“get” means persuading a company or rich friend to stump up).

America’s large museum boards reflect that country’s tax breaks for charity and its tradition of giving to local institutions. In Britain, by contrast, the circle of major donors is tiny. One chair of a museum in London counts no more than eight big donors. The most important is Len Blavatnik, an industrialist born in Ukraine, who responded in 2017 when Tate Modern found that its new Switch House extension had left it with a £30m funding shortfall. Soon after it opened, the Switch House was renamed the Blavatnik Building.

At the same time, museums have tried to make themselves more relevant and edgy. Benjamin Ives Gilman, for 30 years secretary of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, used to describe the museum as “in essence a temple”. Now, says Sir Nicholas Serota, a former director of the Tate galleries, they are “a forum for debate as much as a treasure box”.

Attracting young visitors is a priority for all museums. Most have a director of “public engagement” whose job it is to bring them in. The Tate, one of the leaders, has created Tate Forum, a “peer-led” youth project that combines museum talks with open debates. Many museums have stopped disapproving of mobile phones; the Brooklyn Museum even encourages visitors to text questions to curators. Teenagers flock to sleepovers in the British Museum’s Egyptian galleries.

Young people are quick to signal what they like—and what they don’t. Having worked so hard to engage with them and solicit their views, the museums should perhaps not be too surprised when their customers turn on their donors.