Vandals took out their anger at BP on the Durango Arts Center's canvas awning sometime last week, but the misguided protest is going to hurt the struggling nonprofit, its director said Monday.
DAC Executive Director Sheri Rochford Figgs said she'll have to replace the entire awning, which faces East Second Avenue and is decorated with the names of "significant" donors, except for, now, BP.
Kindra Arnesen is the wife of a Gulf fisherman and she's been kicking butt on exposing BP abuses. In this latest news, she's discovered that BP is claiming is that if fishermen choose not to take part in the oil spill cleanup, BP will consider that as potential income declined and deduct it from their claims.
The controversy has divided Britain's art community. Those pushing for a boycott of BP sponsorships argue Britain's arts and cultural institutions are demeaning themselves by lending a little of their cache to the embattled oil giant.
The opposing argument was most pungently summed up by Jonathan Jones, art critic for the liberal guardian newspaper. If, in these perilous times, Britain's museums and galleries can get money from Satan, himself, he wrote, they should take it.
Great art has always been involved with great fortunes: it was only a temporary distortion of history, a hangover from the Romantic idea that artists need be poor and tormented, that insisted art must be uncontaminated by trade. Patronage may well be a non-negotiable part of artistic activity. For a while, this principle was blurred when the interventionist
economist J M Keynes helped found the Arts Council after the Second World War. Keynes simply made the state a patron. Do the oily protesters advocate refusal of the Arts Council's "government" money supporting the Tate because the same government money funded an illegal war in Iraq and a tragic war in Afghanistan? Of course they don't.
And then at quarter past seven, eight people dressed in black with veils over their heads walk slowly towards the Manton Street entrance. They are carrying black buckets with the BP logo painted clearly on them. It's clear that something odd is about to happen, but everyone is peculiarly frozen to the spot. Only when the first protester throws the contents of his bucket forward down the steps of the entrance do the assembled crowd realise that what is happening is molasses. About five gallons of it.
Others protesters from the art activist group Liberate Tate tip their buckets forward too, spilling the thick brown-black liquid across the pavement and down the steps to the party entrance (watch the video above). Then they pull feathers from their pockets and throw them on top of the molasses. The party guest beside me – a woman in turquoise separates - is beside herself with fury. As the protesters scatter through the dumbstruck crowd, she grabs at the veil on the head of one (moving a lot faster than any of the security guards, who seem to be processing events on dial-up rather than broadband) and pulls it off, shouting "How dare you! How dare you! Get him! Get him!"
As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations.
We represent a cross-section of people from the arts community that believe that the BP logo represents a stain on Tate's international reputation. Many artists are angry that Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. Little more than a decade ago, tobacco companies were seen as respectable partners for public institutions to gain support from – that is no longer the case. It is our hope that oil and gas will soon be seen in the same light. The public is rapidly coming to recognise that the sponsorship programmes of BP and Shell are means by which attention can be distracted from their impacts on human rights, the environment and the global climate.
Artists, musicians and green activists plan to step up protests against BP's sponsorship of Britain's most prestigious galleries and museums in the wake of the Gulf oil catastrophe.
A group calling itself Good Crude Britannia, made up of artists, poets, writers and filmmakers, will picket Tate Britain's summer party next Monday which is billed by the gallery as celebrating 20 years of BP's sponsorship.
Last month a group called Liberate Tate entered the gallery's main turbine hall and released dozens of black balloons attached to dead fish in protest against the Gulf oil spill. Gallery staff had to shoot the balloons down with air rifles.
A key component of BP's response to the Gulf oil spill is the use of commercial and charter fishing vessels from communities along the Gulf shoreline participating in BP's "Vessel of Opportunity" program.And from al.com this morning:
FORT MORGAN, Ala. -- An Orange Beach, Ala., charter boat captain shot and killed himself this morning just before his vessel was scheduled to set out to take part in oil cleanup and protection efforts, investigators said...A statement by the Gulf Shores Police Department said Kruse shot himself in the head.
Kruse did like to know what was going on and was particularly frustrated with the lack of straight answers coming from BP about the Vessel of Opportunity program and particularly about how he was to be paid once his 2 boats were deployed.
"It's a nightmare with just all of the paperwork and training and then waiting to get hired on top of the fact we're all stressed about losing our entire season anyway," Bell said. "I hate to say it, but I'm surprised something like this hasn't already happened."
Indeed, the poll shows that only 6 percent have a favorable rating of BP. In the history of the NBC News/Journal poll, Saddam Hussein (3 percent), Fidel Castro (3 percent) and Yasser Arafat (4 percent) have had lower favorable scores, and O.J. Simpson (11 percent) and tobacco-maker Philip Morris (15 percent) have had higher ratings.
The benefits of arts patronage far outweighed its costs, philanthropy professionals said.
“If they were spending billions on it, then people might say that it was a waste of shareholders’ money, which should be spent on cleaning up beaches,” said Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, a nonprofit organization that links arts bodies with corporate and private donors. “Saving that money will not do anything to the coastline of America.”
“It’s a relatively small amount, but the impact they can have with it is far greater,” said Tweedy.
But the sentiments expressed at this particular rally were, as it turns out, about 300 percent crazier even than I had feared.
...the rally was mostly two hours of yelling about how climate change is natural—"I've never seen CO2 in the air, have you ever seen CO2 in the air??"—how Barack Obama is simultaneously trying to enslave the American population and steal from it, and how welfare recipients should have to be regularly drug tested. One speaker gave the usual "We don't need the government" speech, followed immediately by, "If the government was doing its job making sure MMS did its job, we wouldn't be here. Why wasn't the government looking down their throats?" Another speaker pointed out that we're at two wars, one in Iran and one in Afghanistan, and that if we're not careful, the president of Israel, Ahmadinejad, is going to gain enough power to take over the world.
"Whose agenda is Obama pushing?" one speaker asked, and everyone yelled, "George Soros'!" Then we watched a video montage including footage of American soldiers, stills of Obama in Dark Knight Joker makeup, and the sun rising and setting on the Gulf of Mexico, set to Queen's "The Show Must Go On." Then we watched another video with clips of Rahm Emanuel and ACORN employees intercut with pictures of Chairman Mao, all over the superdramatic theme music from Requiem for a Dream.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
You should submit your apology to BP. You can submit videos, photos, quotes, whatever you want, as long as you apologize for the thing you did to BP. Did you eat all BP's cheetos? Did you forget to fill up their tank the last time you borrowed their car? Let it all out. Make amends. Say you are sorry.There's also a Twitter hashtag #imsorrybp
Gulf commercial shrimper Diane Wilson was arrested for interrupting BP CEO Tony Hayward's testimony on Capitol Hill. Hayward barely started his opening statement when Wilson, painted to look like she had oil on her, shouted, ""You need to be charged with a crime!"
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We know that the country is eager for reassurance. We’re not sure the American people got it from a speech that was short on specifics and devoid of self-criticism.
Were you looking for something that resembled a fully-realized action plan, describing a detailed approach to containment and clean up? Or perhaps a definitive statement, severing the command and control that BP has largely enjoyed, in favor of a structured, centralized federal response? Maybe you were looking for a roadmap-slash-timetable for putting America on a path to a clean energy future? Well, this speech was none of those things.
Oval Office addresses do indeed lend a certain gravitas to any issue, but this one on Day 57 of a crisis can’t begin to undo the lasting damage of both the oil spill and an administration flummoxed in its response.
While not particularly inspiring, he accepted responsibility for the massive cleanup and signaled he understands this is a serious test of his administration.
