Article from Australian Sponsorship News
www.sponsorshipnews.com.au
"Gold-diggers" remark doesn't sit well with the Arts
26 October 2011 2:39pm
A senior executive who bemoaned the unsophisticated sponsorship pitches he receives from "love and cash starved" arts organisations has attracted the ire of the Australia Business Arts Foundation.
Emanuel Perdis, managing director of $80 million cosmetics brand Napoleon Perdis, last week said there's a sense of entitlement among many arts organisations that feel corporations owe them a living.
"When arts organisations approach you with their big greedy eyes it makes you uncomfortable," he said, raising a few eyebrows at the Sponsorship Australasia conference.
Abaf CEO Jane Haley was present at the session and told Sponsorship News afterwards that more than $100 million a year is spent by business in Australia in arts partnerships.
"It's not an insignificant industry and I think we should be respectful of it," she said.
"What he said is simply not true."
Haley said that while some arts organisations may be guilty of "bad behaviour", in approaching companies with poorly thought out approaches, they are in the minority.
"I think there are so many more arts organisations that are really sophisticated and really capable in the way in which they approach corporate partners," she said.
Perdis today said he would not retract his comments when contacted by Sponsorship News.
"My exact words were, they have a 'gold-digger glare'," he said.
He said the arts organisations his company sponsors - the Australian Ballet and the Australian Film Institute - don't have this attitude.
"[They] are actually quite respectful of corporate patronage and sponsorship," he said.
But he said Napoleon Perdis has had many approaches from small to medium sized arts organisations that "see corporations as leviathans with deep pockets".
"That's uncomfortable because sponsorship is a two-way partnership, and both have to get [something] out of it and both have to give into it," he said.
As well as arts organisations that use companies as "pockets or ATM machines", Perdis said companies themselves also use the arts to "launder their image".
"That's equally as bad as the gold-diggers mentality, I find that equally offensive and unsettling."