At a small print fair in East London, between a stack of risograph posters about Palestine and a screenprint priced at £180, with the proceeds divided between the artist and a refugee legal fund, I first became aware of how bizarre the charity edition has become. Holding the print at arm’s length, the buyer in front of me paused and asked the gallerist if the legal fund was connected to a specific hedge fund donor. The gallerist was unaware. Nevertheless, the buyer purchased it. There was a brief, uneasy silence that has lingered in my memory ever since.
In a sense, the whole topic is that pause. In the past ten years, charity editions—signed, limited-edition prints sold to support a cause—have grown to be one of the most widely used tools of political art. They have a democratic feeling. They feel beneficial. However, most collectors are unaware of how shaky the moral architecture is beneath the surface. According to the Arts Professional Ethics Survey, which Michelle Wright of CAUSE4 cited, over 70% of workers in arts organizations believe their employer faces reputational risk due to affiliation with a sponsor or significant donor. It’s difficult to ignore that figure.
The industry learned something from the Sackler incident that it ought to have known all along. Money is never just money. Curators in London were left to explain nameplates on rooms that no longer carried the name comfortably when the Sackler Trust’s funding of major arts institutions collapsed due to the Purdue Pharma opioid story. During the Farnborough arms fair, the Design Museum hosted a private event for a defense contractor as part of its “Hope to Nope” exhibition, which honored political protest. Thirty artists requested that their pieces be removed. Depending on how you interpret it, it was either poor scheduling or hypocrisy. Most likely both.
This mess leaves charity editions with a more subdued form of the same issue. For example, the artist creates a piece about climate displacement. It is printed by a foundation. It is sold by a platform. The platform receives payment processing fees from a bank exposed to fossil fuels at some point in the chain, and a trustee whose family office owns the same shares is a member of the foundation’s board. Nothing about this is against the law. Very little of it is revealed. Most buyers don’t inquire.
Curators I’ve spoken to seem to feel that the industry doesn’t want to examine things too closely. Fearing cuts to public funding, trustees are becoming more risk-averse rather than less, and an ethical policy that actually limits donor relationships may seem like a luxury. Just slightly more than 25% of the organizations polled had any kind of written ethical fundraising policy. The quiet scandal is that figure, not the Sackler headlines.
On the other side of this discussion is Milo Rau’s Congo Tribunal. Rau maintains that “where politics fail, only art can take over,” which may seem harsh at first. The project blurs the lines between fact and fiction, makes selective claims about its impact, and runs the risk of using Congolese suffering as raw material for a European stage, according to critics, including scholars writing for Africa Is a Country. The money is spent somewhere. The questions remain.
Perhaps the truth is that redemption mechanisms do not apply to charity editions. They are transactions, but they are dressed more elegantly. According to Wright, a defensible one necessitates artists willing to lose a sale, trustees willing to argue, and donors willing to be questioned. It’s a big request. It’s still worthwhile to inquire.
