‘Art News’: Big Growth in Corporate Sponsors

By CONSTANCE CASEY

Increasingly “corporations are not asking what they can do for art, but what art can do for them,” says the magazine Art News (May).

Not only are exhibitions good publicity for corporations’ brand names, they also provide significant social opportunities. Merrill Lynch, for example, which recently sponsored “Renoir to Rothko” at the Phillips Collection in Washington, used the show for client entertaining. Andersen Consulting arranged private viewings for potential clients of the blockbuster show the company helped finance, “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

“We can build personal relationships, which is critical,” an Andersen spokesman told the magazine. “We sponsor golf for the same reason.”

On the business side of the equation, museums, like New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, are enticing corporate sponsors with data on the desirable demographics of their audience and the extensive plans the museum has to promote the exhibit. The sponsorship trend is unlikely to go away. Art News reports increasing competition among corporations to attach their names to highly visible, high-quality art shows.

But some in the art world fear that corporate sponsors may influence the type of shows museums decide to put on, and that museums may produce certain kinds of exhibitions specifically to gain favor with donors, the magazine says.