Undoubtedly the opportunity to present exhibitions at galleries of the standing of Tate Modern and MoMA provides excellent brand awareness for UBS and official endorsement for the value and importance of its collection. Yet financial reliance on this type of 'partnership' raises questions concerning conflicts of interest and the ethics of public galleries providing a showcase for the private collection of a major corporate sponsor.
To investigate whose interests are being served by UBS's various forays into the arts world, I widened my on-line research on the UBS Art Collection by using Google, Findarticles.com and Factiva.com.
UBS activities in art banking are part of a new trend for investment banks to provide dedicated art-advisory departments. UBS's corporate sponsorship of art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach is not unusual in the art world and creates brand awareness and favourable opportunities for client entertaining, networking and buying by offering clients special access to artist presentations and the opportunity to mingle with dealers.
Art collecting as a vehicle for brand building is not a new corporate concept. Lending banking a new creativity discusses UBS art acquisition process and the value and risks of publicly exhibiting works from the collection. Further Google searches uncovered a series of interviews with the collection executive of the UBS Art Collection regarding the company's art collection strategy and the company’s strategy for making its collection accessible to the public.
Exhibitions of corporate collections in major museums are no longer a novelty. However the type of sponsorship partnerships that UBS has structured with MoMA, Tate Modern for 2006 and 2007 and now the AGNSW are a different story and my research has uncovered considerable press scrutiny of these arrangements. The issue of whether the public trust in the gallery’s independent curatorial judgment is being betrayed, is a recurrent theme.
Corporate Taste in Art, and the Art of Donation was the opinion of New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in her review of MoMA’s inauguration of its new home with a show of gifts and loans from UBS of ‘pre-approved and risk-free’ works from the last century. MoMA has inaugurated its exhibition program with an ‘appalling paean to a corporate sponsor’s blue-chip collection (which) gave … UBS an excuse to plaster the city with advertisements that made MoMA seem like its tool and minor subsidiary’ argued Michael Kimmelman in his article Art, Money and Power .
Tate Modern has sold its soul – and us – down the river suggests The Guardian in its recent review of the UBS arrangements. Transparency in arts funding? Don’t bank on it writes The Independent which is ‘far from thrilled that the precedent has been set’ by three rooms of the Tate Modern being given over to drawings from The UBS Collection. The government is leaving responsibility for funding to big business. Will the arts suffer for it? asks the New Statesman. More direct is the colourful review by art critic Brian Sewell in The Evening Standard So where are all the Masterpieces? which suggests ‘that Serota and his trustees – all of whom should at once have seen the menace in this sponsorship deal – have, with a very short spoon, supped with the devil’.
Whatever the verdict on the ethics and conflicts debate, one thing is clear: banks today fulfil the role once assumed by the Medicis and the Catholic Church... they are fast becoming the new masters of the arts universe.