On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, C.G. West wrote:

> I am a Masters Student in Museum Studies at Leicester University, England.  My
> dissertation is seeking to explore the ethics of sponsorship in
> museums.

> I am interested to know if any museum or arts organisations out there
> have formal codes when dealing with seeking and accepting
> sponsorship?

> Does your museum consider the reputation, nature of the sponsoring
> companies behaviour in the environment, testing on animals (this type
> of thing) when seeking /accepting their money?

> What about the idea that museums/arts organisaztions are selling
> their audience to the sponsor for the finance for an exhibition - is
> this ethical.

C.G, I applaud your project and hope you'll share your results with us.
I have watched the Smithsonian Institution sell much of its reputation,
integrity and dignity to corporate hucksters. Like the collapse of an
overexpanded star, the process seems to be accelerating at an accelerating
rate. In a number of its Washington Mall museums, the priority assigned to
an exhibition project, its tone and much of its content are strongly
influenced and sometimes directly shaped by "advisors" and "liaison
personnel" from corporate sponsors or lobbying groups.

This is particularly evident at the National Air and Space Museum, which
is largely a showcase of, for and by the aerospace industry. At the
opening of Science in American Life, a major permanet exhibition at the
National Museum of American History, the president of the sponsoring
American Chemical Society led a claque of his sycophants through the show,
loudly boasting of how various texts were repeatedly revised until the ACS
was satisfied. And at the National Museum of Natural History we have the
O. Orkin Insect Zoo, which bears not only the name but the distinctive
corporate logo of a company whose business is--killing insects.

I get continual anonymous and back-channel laments from Smithsonian
staffers who are sickened and outraged at having to solicit corporate
sponsorship in order to have their proposals considered, and who have to
produce exhibits under the "guidance"--which often amounts to the
supervision--of those sponsors. The practice has grown so pervasive that a
Smithsonian field researcher commented to me this summer that "I guess the
next step will be for us to sew a Smithsonian patche on one sleeve and the
sponsor's patch on the other."

Your research project promises to be extraordinarily fruitful, especially
if you can arrange to travel widely in the U.S. That would be quite
expensive, of course. But I'm confident that you could find a number of
generous sponsors, if you framed the proposal cleverly....

     Hank Burchard * <[log in to unmask]> * Washington DC | USA