If you happen to be in the London area this week, Platform, Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate are launching a new publication, ‘Not if but when – Culture Beyond Oil’ on the evening of Tuesday 29 November.

The publication features art work that people have made in response to oil companies and their impacts, as well as a series of articles examining the issues in greater detail.

Like the title of the publication states, it’s not a question of if, but when oil-sponsorship becomes socially unacceptable, in the same way that tobacco sponsorship did a few decades back.

In the last two years, art-interventionists Liberate Tate have been doing a great job of creatively bringing this tension to the surface through a series of high impact, direct action performances in gallery spaces that have propelled the issue into the mainstream.

If you accept the need to draw some sort of line about what is and what isn’t ethically acceptable, then we need to renegotiate exactly where thNose lines are in light of our awareness of the role that oil companies are playing in dragging us to the edge of climate catastrophe.

There’s a growing sense in the cultural sector of this being the case. Apart from letters signed by hundreds of people in the arts Liberate Tate and Platform are sending round a petition calling on Nick Serota to end the relationship with BP.

There’s been a great response to it so far, but we’re still hoping to get a few thousand more signatures on to it before we present it to the Tate board. Click here to sign it, and please share it with other people who you think might be interested.

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Follow ‘End oil sponsorship of the arts’ on facebook, and @platformlondon and @liberatetate on twitter, to stay up to date with this campaign.

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   New publication on 'culture beyond oil' http://t.co/GCqRqisG

2. AdamFlude &Friends

   New publication on 'culture beyond oil' http://t.co/GCqRqisG