Art institutions should stop virtue-signalling about funding and focus on what they’re showing

The ethics of the private patronage of arts institutions has never been straightforward issue. But as the preoccupation with transparency and corporate responsibility has grown, wealthy benefactors can nowadays turn from pillars of respectable society to moral pariahs in the blink of an eye. Such is the fate of the fabulously rich Sackler family, major philanthropists with fingers in arts institutions across the UK, in the face of mounting criticism over its close links to Purdue Pharma, the family-owned US pharmaceuticals giant and maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin – the drug now the focus of outrage over the opioid epidemic that has made addicts of thousands in the US over the last two decades.

Since legendary American photographer Nan Goldin, herself a recovered OxyContin addict and now a ferocious campaigner against the Sacklers’ munificence among US institutions, had threatened to pull her anticipated retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery for its earlier acceptance of a Sackler gift, the issue has snowballed in the UK.