Earlier this month, the Federal Court of Australia dismissed claims brought by the concert pianist Jayson Gillham against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra over its response to a recital he gave in August 2024. What caused the trouble was not his piano-playing but an oratorical prelude condemning Israel for (in his telling) the war crime of deliberately killing journalists in Gaza. In the cacophony that ensued, the MSO cancelled his next performance, telling subscribers that his remarks had been “an intrusion of personal political views”. Then some of its own musicians revolted, and the orchestra offered to reinstate the performance on the condition that there be no physical or verbal statement from the stage. Our virtuous virtuoso declined. The managing director left her role after the musicians passed a vote of “no confidence” in senior management, and the board announced an independent review.
In court, Gillham contended, in effect, that he had been discriminated against for expressing political views. Those attuned to it detected a familiar-sounding bassline in his lawyers’ arguments—the purported influence of Jewish board members and wealthy donors whom the MSO was allegedly trying to appease.
Rejecting Gillham’s claims, the court accepted that the MSO had acted on perceived business consequences, among them the reputational risk arising from the use of its stage for an unapproved political statement. The judgment effectively supports the proposition that an organisation may regulate how its platform is used in order to protect its business interests, provided its actions are directed at those interests rather than at suppressing the views expressed.
The case has attracted international attention, throwing light on the murky manoeuvring that arts and cultural institutions increasingly have to undertake to accommodate the competing interests of their stakeholders: donors, staff, artists, management and the public.
We are in the throes of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, as baby boomers die and pass their wealth to their spouses and ultimately to their children. In the United States alone, some US$124 trillion is expected to change hands by 2048, of which roughly US$18 trillion is expected to flow to philanthropy.
Charities are an integral part of civil society, both reflecting the societies they serve and helping to shape them. They are also engines of the economy, driving innovation, research, community engagement and policy reform.
The wealth that will flow to philanthropy, at a time of extraordinary social, political, technological and economic upheaval, is not merely a financial shift but a cultural one—a redrawing of the map of wealth and influence.
For some donors, charity is a gateway to soft power—a way to wield influence and shape policy and values while escaping oversight and accountability.
It is not surprising, then, that charities and not-for-profits find themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. Conflict arises not only over what these organisations do with their money but over where that money comes from. The identity and influence of donors have long been contested for human rights NGOs and educational institutions; increasingly it is contested for galleries, museums, literary festivals and theatre companies too.
It would be naïve to think that philanthropic donations are only ever made for altruistic reasons. For some donors, charity is a gateway to soft power—a way to wield influence and shape policy and values while escaping oversight and accountability. Large gifts attract publicity, yield social currency and help to entrench a benign legacy in the public mind. Hence the accusations of “reputation laundering”.
On one view, philanthropy perpetuates the very system of structural inequity that concentrated the wealth in the first place: the money remains tainted, and it taints the recipient. The counterargument is that the wealth already exists, so it may as well be put to public good. But at what cost? Is it a Faustian bargain?
When the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apologised for accepting donations from Jeffrey Epstein—whom the institute’s own records had already classified as a “disqualified donor”—he wrote: “With hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts.”
In deciding whether to accept a large donation, a charity must weigh whether acceptance is consistent with its purposes, how much control it is willing to cede, and the reputational risk of being associated with a donor—or the concentration risk of becoming dependent on one. It must consider everyone else in the ecosystem: employees and volunteers, other donors, and the people who benefit from its services or funding. Some organisations now have ethics committees and gift-acceptance policies, and publish them to give transparency to their processes.
The bigger the donation, the more likely it is that the donor’s relationship with the charity is, in essence, transactional, and that the terms of that relationship are negotiated like any other transaction. I give you $1 million: what are you prepared to give me for it? Invitations to elite conferences and dinners? A seat on the board? Naming rights? Consultation over policy direction?
None of this is new, and it is usually dealt with in gift agreements. What is newer is the “morals clause”, an increasingly common if contentious provision that allows a charity to terminate the relationship—including by “de-naming”—if a donor begins to bring it into disrepute.
The risk of being tarnished by a donor is nowhere more acute than where the donor holds naming rights, a centuries-old practice that exists precisely to perpetuate a positive legacy. After one of New Zealand’s most generous arts patrons was convicted of indecent assault and of attempting to pervert the course of justice, the charity he founded—the eponymous James Wallace Arts Trust—transferred its collection, worth several tens of millions of dollars, to a new trust bearing no trace of his name.
In exchange for US$200 million, the largest single gift the Smithsonian has ever received (the institution is itself named for its founding benefactor, the scientist James Smithson, who died almost two hundred years ago), Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos has naming rights on a new building at the National Air and Space Museum, and in several other places across the institution, for at least fifty years. The agreement contains no morals clause. Given the controversies over Amazon’s labour practices, that is a risk—but clearly one the Smithsonian decided was worth taking.
Harder to manage are the interventions and campaigns by artists and activist groups that pressure charities to divest or dissociate from their donors.
BP was once among the leading arts sponsors in the United Kingdom. After years of protests accusing it of “greenwashing”, Tate, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Scottish Ballet, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Opera House all ended their funding partnerships with it. The British Museum let its twenty-seven-year sponsorship lapse in 2023—and then, months later, accepted a £50 million donation from BP towards its ten-year redevelopment. The Science Museum retains a BP-funded education academy. Last year, internal BP memos were made public showing how the company had used cultural sponsorship to “secure public support and advocacy from partners to mitigate risks and advance business interests”.
In 2019, the Whitney’s vice-chairman and a significant donor, Warren B. Kanders, resigned after protests by staff and artists over his ownership of Safariland, a manufacturer of tear gas that had been used against migrants at the US–Mexico border. He later announced that he would sell the divisions responsible—a result the activists claimed as a victory, though subsequent reporting suggested he had rearranged his holdings rather than left the trade.
There is perhaps no greater scandal in arts funding than the Sacklers, both for the scale of their philanthropy and for the scale of their disgrace. The family owned Purdue Pharma, which developed OxyContin, the painkiller now synonymous with the opioid crisis. Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed Empire of Pain documents how the family’s philanthropic strategy laundered its reputation and won it a kind of sacrosanct status, especially in the art world.
That began to change when the American photographer Nan Goldin, herself once addicted to OxyContin, launched a campaign against the family. The Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’s National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the Louvre had all taken Sackler money and displayed the family name. One by one, they stopped. The Purdue Pharma settlement approved by a US bankruptcy court late last year gave beneficiary institutions the right to strip the Sackler name from galleries, buildings and scholarships without liability, provided the announcements were non-disparaging.
Harvard bucked the trend. In 2024 it announced that it would not rename the Arthur M. Sackler Museum or the Arthur M. Sackler Building, ending a long campaign by students. Arthur Sackler died nine years before OxyContin came to market, and after his death his wing of the family sold out its stake. “Arthur Sackler’s legacy is complex, ambiguous, and debatable,” the Harvard committee’s report stated. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways that may not have been foreseen originally.” It recommended that the university display explanations of Sackler’s life and legacy in the buildings themselves, so that “people will be allowed to form their own judgments about Arthur Sackler and the naming”.
Such nuance is rare. These interventions may begin with good intentions, but they tend to become blunt instruments with unclear and expansive parameters. That is especially so where activists subscribe to “intersectionality”—the analytical framework holding that all forms of injustice and oppression are interlinked—which inevitably admits the Palestinian cause to its menu of grievances, though not, apparently, abducted Ukrainian children, Afghan women, Iranian dissidents, or many another unworthy causes.
Mission creep of exactly this kind overtook the campaign against Baillie Gifford, the investment firm that sponsored a string of literary festivals and still sponsors the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction—which, ironically, Empire of Pain won in 2021. The activists, a collective calling itself Fossil Free Books, set out to use the firm’s relationship with the festivals as leverage to force it out of fossil fuels. They then added a demand that Baillie Gifford divest “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”, on the ground that “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”. In May 2024, more than 700 writers and publishing industry professionals signed an open letter calling on Baillie Gifford to divest from fossil fuels and cease its links to Israel.
Instead, Baillie Gifford divested itself of the literary festivals. Within weeks it had withdrawn from every book festival it sponsored in Britain.
Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Wales moved first, after a number of writers scheduled to appear at its 2024 event pulled out. Two days into the festival, Hay announced that it was suspending the sponsorship. “Our first priority is to our audience and our artists,” its chief executive said. “Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives”—without explaining how the sponsorship had precluded any of that.
