After Baillie Gifford, who is ‘clean’ enough to fund the arts? The campaign against the asset manager has left festivals struggling to adapt to a new age of protest.

The entire purpose of the arts is to foster change. Morally dubious benefactors far worse than today's (histotically: imperialist companies, oil barons, railroad tycoons, etc) have been patronizing the arts and they still generally, meaningfully helped society progres, and we have dragged society kicking and screaming into the future.

So much of modern activism is "perfect getting in the way of good " This is a demonstrable example with severe harm being done to institutions with limited other options for funding. Rather than solve the problem of pushing the government into public funding with activism in that space, which would be a long, arduous task, they take the easy road of shouting about what is immediately angering and strongarming the organizations into defunding themselves out of existence. This is doing the work of those who redirected public arts funds for them.

"The Baillie Gifford affair was partly a misjudgment. The denouement seemed to surprise everyone. “We were pretty shocked when Hay said it was dropping Baillie Gifford. We expected it to be a much longer-term campaign,” says a representative of Fossil Free Books, the small campaign group involved. (The representative, a relatively well-known author, asks not to be named, because, in the spirit of the age, the group reaches its decisions collectively.) “Our campaign was meant to be the start of a negotiation.”"

This is interesting