Paying to restore a Rembrandt in Prague, sponsoring the season at London’s Old Vic Theatre, co- funding a Roy Lichtenstein show in Paris: It’s all in a year’s work for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Twenty-four recipients in 16 countries -- including Rembrandt’s “Scholar in his Study” (1634) and Courbet’s “The Painter’s Studio” (1854-55) -- will get cash from Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project this year, the bank said this month. In other patronage, Roy Lichtenstein opens July 3 at Paris’s Pompidou Center (after Chicago, Washington and London), and the Royal Opera’s Benjamin Britten opera “Gloriana” is beamed on global cinema screens June 24.
At a time when companies are cutting arts patronage -- U.K. spending was little changed in the year to April 2012, after four annual drops, according to Arts & Business -- Bank of America has kept its global spend at some $40 million a year. That’s even as its shares have dropped by two-thirds since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Sponsorees, including Old Vic Artistic Director Kevin Spacey, say they are relieved.
Bank of America’s support has been “vast, across the board, and remarkably daring,” Spacey says in a telephone interview.
The actor remembers how, right before the global recession, he and director Sam Mendes asked the bank to back their 2009- 2012 “Bridge Project” of transatlantic theater.
“Sam and I kept waiting for the phone to ring,” recalls Spacey, “that they were very sorry, but they were going to have to pull out of this crazy three-year sponsorship of bringing Shakespeare around the world. But that phone call never came.”
What’s in it for Bank of America?
“We have a pretty good record of choosing the things that are hot and get on the radar screen,” replies Rena DeSisto, the bank’s global arts and culture executive. In terms of brand value, “there’s a multiplier effect.”
Sponsorship once meant an executive picking a show and handing over money. Today it’s about “making sure it’s a partnership and we’re extracting benefits,” says DeSisto -- through education programs, family days, free-access days, and other exchanges.