A New York Times art review of a show of automobiles at the Museum of Modern Art faults the museum for lending its reputational gloss to Volkswagen.
The review says:
In a wall panel the curators mention the Beetle's "inglorious origins," though there is more recent VW unpleasantness this show and catalog do not discuss. Over the last decade, MoMA has enjoyed more than a million dollars in support each year from Volkswagen — a company that admitted to equipping 11 million cars with illegal software to cheat emissions testing, and then lying to investigators about the scheme. Researchers at West Virginia University found some cars equipped with the software belched almost 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxides. In early 2017, Volkswagen pleaded guilty in the United States to criminal charges that included conspiracy to defraud the government, violations of the Clean Air Act and obstruction of justice. VW paid $20 billion to resolve civil and criminal charges related to the scandal, and that figure has grown since then.
While one VW division was violating the Clean Air Act, another was putting its name on MoMA programming that would boost its civic credentials — notably "Expo 1: New York," at MoMA PS1, a Volkswagen-funded ecological showcase from 2013 that in retrospect looks like an egregious act of greenwashing.
Lower down, the review says:
really, this might all be so much inside-philanthropy, except that the organizers of "Automania" explicitly discuss polluters' interest in art in the catalog and the museum's online magazine. In both, Kinchin writes about the corporate practice of "artwashing, a by now well-established branding strategy practiced by the polluting fossil fuel industry." The curator singles out Shell, which commissioned English artists to make posters of the bucolic English countryside; it also mentions Mobil, whose art philanthropy in the 1970s and 1980s was the subject of Hans Haacke's institutional critique, and recent demonstrations against BP's sponsorship of London museums.
For MoMA to criticize Shell, Mobil and BP for "artwashing," and then to ignore the criminal polluters still supporting its own museum, takes a real brass neck. But some drivers, even when the future looks unsustainable, find it hard to give up their cars.
It's hypocritical of the Times to criticizing MoMA for taking Volkswagen money. The Times itself accepts advertising from Volkswagen. The Times Company also allows the newspaper's reporters, and contractors who deliver the newspaper to subscribers, to drive non-electric cars.
T Brand Studio, a part of the New York Times Company that provides creative services to advertisers, boasts of a project it did for Shell, and also announced a special podcast series to promote the BMW X7, a gas guzzler. In faulting MoMA for accepting funding from an automaker, the Times is holding the museum to a higher standard than the newspaper imposes on itself. Accepting money from a donor doesn't amount to a statement that a donor is ethically pure-as-the-driven-snow, any more than accepting an ad from an advertiser amounts to such an endorsement of a company's product. There may be some donors or advertisers so ethically tainted that it makes sense to refuse them. But the Times review stops short of offering a generally applicable rule for such decisions. The Times review says, "a show devoted to the personal motorcar feels a bit like one devoted to lethal poisons." What's really lethal is the way the Times lets an art review be poisoned by the reviewer's environmental politics.