A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

Artists encourage us to see the world in different ways. Sir Nicholas Serota 1 A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

For many companies, partnerships with renowned cultural institutions have become an integral part of their strategy. They hope that collaboration with the arts will not only help grow their brand, but also give them a creative boost. The idea is that the deliberate change of perspective that comes from engaging with artist and artwork will help change entrenched ways of thinking and promote innovation. Tate Director Sir Nicholas Serota and Lance Uggla, CEO of Markit and UK EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winner 2012, joined EY managing partner commercial Martin Cook to explore the new models of cooperation between museums and corporations. And came to the conclusion that a sustainable partnership of equals between museums and corporations requires an intensive dialogue which may be hard work at times but which benefits both parties. A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla 2

Lance Uggla Whilst we are sitting here talking about corporate sponsorship of the arts, thousands of people are flocking to Tate museums. They are enjoying the Matisse exhibition at Tate Modern or, right next door at Tate Britain, are learning about how ruins have inspired artists work over the centuries. What do you think do any of the visitors whose tickets were sponsored by our Art for All initiative stop and wonder: Why are those Markit people doing this? Why are they paying for my ticket? What s in it for them? Sir Nicholas Serota To be honest, I don t think that the visitors spend much time on such thoughts. And the point of sponsoring the arts isn t to have the beneficiaries wondering about the motives of the sponsors. But of course it s an interesting question in and of itself why a company like EY or Markit would get involved in sponsoring the arts, of all things. After all if the aim is to grab the spotlight, there are more effective CSR projects for that. Lance Uggla Art is a stimulant; it is a connection; it creates networks with people that the corporate sector does not usually get in touch with every day. Art is a stimulant; it is a connection; it creates networks with people that the corporate sector does not usually get in touch with every day. Our partnership with Tate is still in its early days. We joined forces last year to launch Art for All, an initiative targeted at young people and families which provides tickets to Tate exhibitions throughout the year. Even after this relatively short experience I can say that it is a very exciting initiative. We are passionate about supporting those who find themselves in disadvantaged situations in all of the communities we work in. But sponsoring the arts is also challenging because once you are known as a firm that is willing to participate, the demand increases. We are constantly fielding requests to support other projects. And this certainly reflects the growing public expectations for social responsibility by corporations. If we met all requests for financial assistance, our efforts would be fragmented and, at the end of the day, not particularly effective. So we decided to approach sponsoring somewhat more systematically and integrated it into our CSR strategy. There you ll find Art for All, and theatre as well as children s charity initiatives. If you take all this together, you really have a chance to express yourself as a company. You don t have the alternative of not doing anything and not just because if businesses completely withdrew from arts sponsorship, it would spell the end for any number of ambitious projects and exhibitions. In today s war for talent, if you want to attract great employees and then retain and motivate them, you need to be active in CSR. 3 A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

Martin Cook Let s be honest. There are soft factors like engaging people and widening their knowledge, their perspective, but there is also a hard side to it. Supporting exhibitions creates a commercial relationship. The question is how many clients we can take to special events, how many of those are new clients who help us to build new relationships. And yes, at the end of the day you take all that and put it into your return on your marketing expenditure. I would venture to say that a large majority of corporates see it like this. But of course arts sponsorship does always have to compete with other areas of focus. Adding to the CSR and client relations dimension of art sponsorship, I very much support Lance s explanation of how active involvement by our own people helps them develop as individuals and for us as a firm to develop new thinking, problem-solving approaches and create a culture of innovation. Thinking about the arts helps thinking out of the proverbial box and that is often what we get hired for as professional advisors. I would be interested to hear your views on that, Lance. What positive effects on your business can involvement in the arts offer other than CSR activities? Uggla Engagement with the arts means to a far greater extent than sponsoring a sports team or donating to an aid organisation, for instance a culture of dialogue within the company. This makes it easier to look at the world with new eyes and can shake up traditional ways of thinking. As a sponsor of Tate, of course we encourage our employees to go and see the exhibitions. This may take some of them out of their comfort zone; after all, Markit is not necessarily a company of art experts. Some of them may find themselves in front of a painting by Matisse thinking, Okay, but my six-year-old son could have painted that. But then they take the time to think about the painting, carry these impressions home that evening and into the office the next day. People talk to me about an exhibition and I can tell they are doing something that they are perhaps not often called upon to do: They are interpreting what they ve seen, creating space in their minds, freeing their thoughts from their daily routine. And this reflects my own experience. I love museums. I can sit there for hours admiring a well-crafted suit of armour from the Middle Ages and I bring the same enthusiasm to a sculpture exhibition or a retrospective of the works of a modern painter. Without a doubt, art is one area where I d like to expand my knowledge and my comprehension it fascinates me. Business and the arts are two completely different worlds. When they meet, it can only be creative and productive for both sides. Art stimulates in a different way than, say, a fundraiser for a specific charity. Just signing a cheque which can be important and is something we do on occasion doesn t have the same emotional connection. Serota We ve worked with EY for quite a while now, and I think Martin would probably confirm that the engagement with the arts has changed what it means to work for EY Okay, Lance, your message is that companies want to have employees who are creative, imaginative, responsive to innovation. And that s what the arts, what artists do for all of us. They encourage us to see the world in different ways. They help us to see things that we have failed to observe in the world. They are about helping us to understand our own identities. Bearing that in mind, I think for any company the arts create an opportunity to establish new kinds of relationships between the company and the world outside, between the company and its staff, and between the members of the staff. Our cooperation with Markit began only recently, but we ve worked with EY for quite a while now, and I think Martin would probably confirm that the engagement with the arts has changed what it means to work for EY. A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla 4

Cook There is no doubt that it is enormously important for us to be associated with such a fantastic brand as Tate but Tate also appealed because of their regional network of galleries; with Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and Plus Tate as well as their global presence. As I mentioned before there are some commercial benefits for usbut above and beyond that, if we come back to the people, part of our investment in the arts means that some of our people in our Arts Club, which has over 2,000 members, actually learn about the exhibitions in great depth, so that when we take our clients around the exhibition there are EY people helping out the art experts and explaining what s going on. That s a fantastic benefit for them that really engages them. I ll give you an example: One of our receptionists who has been with us for 16 years now stopped me the other day and said: I ve already signed up. I said: What for? And she said: I am going to be an art guide at Late Turner, which will be our next exhibition with Tate in the autumn. That sense of engagement really gives people something extra in their development and it makes a real difference to the feeling around the office. It really matters. Serota I think there has been a noticeable shift in corporate sponsorship over the last ten years, a move away from the safest and most secure, if you like, away from the most conservative forms of art towards the 20th century, to the contemporary, to art that conventionally many people would find to be quite difficult. Cook You are absolutely right. It s the challenge moments we are interested in. The exhibition we just supported was The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee Making Visible. It was the UK s first large-scale Klee exhibition for over a decade and it brought together over 130 colourful drawings, watercolours and paintings from collections around the world. Paul Klee, a radical figure in European modernism, is an extremely difficult artist to know, unless you are an expert in the first place and it was a challenge to convince some of my senior colleagues eers, that this was the right exhibition for us to be involved in. There was some concern in the beginning, but once they d been there, they got it, and then their enthusiasm was enormous. Serota Klee was a figure who was rather well-known in the fifties and sixties, when he was seen as the quintessential modern artist. He has been very important for the artist community, but somehow he vanished from the public consciousness. One of the purposes of our exhibition was to bring him back into public interest. For EY to sponsor Klee was by no means a case of a company jumping at a certain, fast success. There was a risk attached to it, there really was. In the end the success far exceeded our expectations. We hoped that we might get maybe a quarter of a million visitors; we had over 300,000 and the resonance beyond that was very considerable. 5 A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

Uggla The aspect of challenge is very important indeed. For us, the major challenge is choice. Why did we choose to sponsor Tate? And why did we create the Art for All initiative? As a company that operates globally, you ll be asked: Why not the Met? Why not something in Singapore, or Noida, or Dallas? We have large offices in all these places. The next thing you get challenged on is how much you are giving to the theatre versus museums, versus hospices, versus charities abroad. You need to decide. Some of the really special areas you get involved in, like the arts, don t get quite the same heartfelt acceptance from your employees as, for example, financial aid after a natural disaster. So you have to explain, you have to justify your choice. Every time you give in one place, you let somebody else down. You have to look to your guiding principles that you operate under and you need to ensure than your selection is fair. Serota It has become very noticeable that companies are much more focused and, if you like, more professional in the way they grant sponsorship than ten years ago. EY actually set a new benchmark about ten or fifteen years ago, when they started to think: Why are we doing this? Let s focus our activities. Don t use a scattergun approach; we have an objective and we are going to stick with it for a number of years. We are going to work with a small number of organisations and build partnerships, and from those we ll get benefits that can be quantified and measured. Before that, the approach was rather like throwing seed corn on the ground. Uggla What people want to see is that you have a thoughtful CSR programme that is sustainable, that establishes stable relationships. You can t give one year and then withdraw your support the next. It has to be more than just a flash in the pan. But that is exactly what can happen when a less-than-professional approach is taken and when the initiatives are not networked with the other communications channels in the company. A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla 6

Serota I think we have now reached a stage where there is an intimacy and a client relationship built around learning about something together which really benefits both sides. Cook Serota It should not be forgotten that it is also about building trust, and it is about building confidence that the institution, in this case Tate, can deliver in terms of reaching new audiences, in terms of having a programme which has a certain conviction and a certain thoughtfulness to it. We say: Tate understands business. And I am certain that on the other side of the equation, in the corporate world, sponsoring activities have not only been professionalised, but the willingness to become involved in a true partnership with a cultural institution has grown. I don t know if we should really speak of a growing convergence in thinking between business and the arts; it s still early days. But we are still getting closer to having a shared language. Our experience is that these long-term relationships can really yield innovation and they help us to reach audiences that we hadn t otherwise been able to touch. All this can t be developed overnight; you have to learn how to work with each other like in any partnership. What we can clearly see is that the second and third years of a partnership are far more productive than the first year. I think we have now reached a stage where there is an intimacy and a client relationship built around learning about something together which really benefits both sides. But how do you balance those strategic sponsorship programmes with the independence you need for the credibility of Tate? From our point of view it is very clear: We have some choice about which exhibitions we put our name to but we are not the tail wagging the Tate dog. We have a very simple method, which is to come up with the programme and then look for support. It would be very naive of us to say: We d like to get support from a Russian company, so let s put on a Russian artist. There are some sponsors who are only interested in certain kinds of art; there are others who want us to reach a particular audience. We try and tailor our approach to what we know about the company. We start with our sponsor s needs and build packages, large and small, working with clients, employees and families and looking at objectives from profile to engagement. 7 A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

Uggla When the team from Tate sat down with our team we said: How can we attract people who wouldn t normally be able to come to the Tate and make sure that the most important events are accessible to all? That was when the brainstorming started. And then we collaborated in developing Art for All it was a joint venture between two companies. We then wanted to make sure that the programme was extended to all of the Tate galleries not just Tate Modern, but also Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives. That s what we did. And as the relationship grows, we ll take a closer look at how great the response to Art for All has been at each museum. That will allow us to perhaps tweak the programme to suit each target group better. We ll assess and discuss the results with the Tate team. Serota The engagement of companies that operate in a totally different field of the market and have developed a global network in many different sectors of the economy as well as politics brings us into contact with a very large number of opinion leaders people who will talk about the Tate and maybe influence government, who will undoubtedly help us with our public funding in the long term. We are always looking for new ways of doing things, and it is exciting for the team at Tate to work with some of the brightest people in some of the best companies in the country, if not in the world Lance and Martin, you both emphasised that it is about reaching new audiences. I would add: It is about reaching new audiences in innovative ways. With its interactive concept, today Tate Modern is already the most successful museum in the world; instead of the once-hoped-for two million, we now welcome more than five million visitors each year. In the gigantic oil tanks of the former power plant, we are delivering a fully new museum experience featuring performance, workshops and installations. It is our aim to put even more emphasis on fostering the exchange of ideas between artists, curators and the public in the future, especially in the new pyramid building designed by Herzog and de Meuron. It will give Tate Modern more than 21,000 additional square metres of exhibition space spread over 11 floors a 60-percent increase. We now have a programme sponsored by BMW about creating performance, not live in the gallery but broadcast in digital form only. BMW was interested in reaching a worldwide audience through a new medium that we were beginning to explore already, and so we put together this programme. We are always looking for new ways of doing things, and it is exciting for the team at Tate to work with some of the brightest people in some of the best companies in the country, if not in the world. We are trying to break new ground in a number of ways, and we need to find companies that want to break ground alongside us. Sir Nicholas Serota The 68-year-old British art historian is Director of the world-famous Tate Gallery, a network of four art museums in the United Kingdom comprising Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St. Ives and Tate Modern. After studying art history, Sir Nicholas went on to become a department head at the Arts Council of Great Britain before moving to head up the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1973. Starting in 1976, he served as Director of London s Whitechapel Art Gallery for twelve years. It was thanks in part to his notable successes there that he was named Director of the Tate Gallery in 1988. Under his aegis, the former Bankside Power Station was transformed into Tate Modern, today a mecca of contemporary art. Sir Nicholas Serota was knighted in 1999. A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla 8

Lance Uggla Co-founder and CEO of Markit, a global diversified financial information services company that became a Tate Gallery sponsor last year. Through the Art for All initiative, which funds free tickets for all four Tate museums, Markit is aiming to make the arts more attractive to young people and families especially those that find themselves in a disadvantaged position. In just ten years, Markit has grown from a start-up to an international operation employing over 3,000 people in ten countries. In 2012 EY named him UK Entrepreneur of the Year. Martin Cook The commercial managing partner for EY, a global professional services organisation, entered into a three-year arts partnership with Tate last year. The EY Tate arts partnership will help Tate to realise its ambitious arts programme across Tate Modern and Tate Britain, with EY s support being extended through corporate memberships at Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and many of the Plus Tate partners around the country. It will also help Tate realise three major exhibitions entitled The EY Exhibition. This collaboration between two internationally-recognised institutions has the potential to help build a better working world for their visitors and clients respectively, their people, and the communities in which they work. This article first appeared in the magazine Entrepreneur by EY in July 2014. 9 A conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota, Martin Cook and Lance Uggla

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