The Poor Mouth: Trafigura - Corporate Criminals
Hey, artists, you could win £4,000 from a bunch of poisoning cheating lying shits - would that make you feel great? Would that make your career go with a zing? Read on ...
1. Say you wanted to start an art prize for young artists (always a good idea, not enough people do this)
And you were looking around for someone to sponsor it.
Not only sponsor it, but to put their name on it.
You want this prize to last for years, year after year.
So what sort of company would you choose?
Of course, we can't be too sniffy these days, but we'd like the namers of our art prize to have clean hands, in a corporate sense.
We'd like to think that they would have reasons for funding our prize that weren't totally self serving.
And we'd like them to pay for the privilege.
2. Say you were a company that traded oil around the world.
You'd had a bit of difficulty, following your dumping of toxic waste in Africa.
Thousands of people were affected, poisoned, the details are argued over, but not the fact that it happened.
You've spent a few years trying to avoid liability.
Trying to avoid having the facts brought out into the open.
Journalists have been doing their work. They've got hold of internal emails that are fairly damming.
A report you commissioned has been leaked, it's a bit iffy as well.
You're using hard end lawyers to injunct everyone you can think of, to try to stop discussion of the story.
One of your directors, who as leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, has quit.
You're looking for some good PR. You don't mind paying for the privilege.
OK, so bringing Trafigura and artists together seemed like a good idea.
Except that it is damaging to the artists, the judges, the gallery and the art world generally.
But it is great news for Trafigura, who paid £4,000 for the privilege.
Yes, that's right. It cost them £4,000 to attach their name to an art world prize.
The prize is run by suckers who think Trafigura are really 'the good guys', and that it's all media lies.
Yes, the organisers of the prize are giving out great PR for Trafigura. If you know how much Pottinger-Bell type PR costs, you'll see the value in this prize to them.
But my view is this - NO ARTIST WITH ANY BRAINS SHOULD HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Any artist who wins this prize is poisoned. Poisoned.
I'm waiting for artists and judges to come out and say the disassociate themselves from this prize - but I won't hold my breathe.
[UPDATE: They binned the connection. This is exactly what I suggested to them on Friday. I said it wasn't worth the 4 grand, better to just go without the money. And guess what - they decided that the artists could do without it. Well, artists need money, but not this sort of crap. This is how the curator told me:
Ivan, I guess you have not had the Cynthia Corbett's official announcement on Friday that we have relinquished Trafigura's sponsorship. The prize is renamed the Young Masters Art Prize and will be honorific, not monetary.
The artists and art prize judges approve and support our decision.
I would be grateful if you could stop spreading erroneous rumours that are damaging to people who have no association with Trafigura whatsoever.
Constance Slaughter ]
Here are the artists concerned:
Gemma Anderson, Lluís Barba, Jessie Bond, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Maisie Broadhead, Cecile Chong, Héctor de Gregorio, Alice Evans, Art Basel exhibitors Ghost of a Dream, Kerry Jameson, Valerie Mary, Ali Miller, David Roche, Constance Slaughter, Antonia Tibble and Masaki Yada.
Constance Slaughter is also the curator - she is acting as unpaid PR for Trafigura as well.
The judges are:
Medeia Cohan-Petrolino, Head Curator for the University of the Arts London; Tom Hunter, artist; Lock Anderson Kresler, Christie’s Contemporary Art Department; Averill Ogden, Outset Art Fund, and Gilda Williams, Goldsmith’s lecturer.
If you know any of them, drop them a line and tell them. Just tell them.
And why not call the organisers and tell them what you think: Cynthia Corbett 020 8947 6782 or 07939 085076 (all from their web site, public information)
- With thanks to Will Wiles
Home - Young Masters: contemporary art exhibition, October/November 2009
The forthcoming Young Masters exhibition, presented by The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, and curated by Constance Slaughter and Beth Colocci features emerging and newly established artists whose work is inspired by Old Masters. Through painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, each artist references an element of the established art historical canon, either through technique, imagery, or subject, whilst establishing an undeniably contemporary spin on highly revered paintings. The artists offer images that are familiar icons, often instantly recognisable, yet re-interpreted, distorted and somewhat uncanny.
Young Masters includes work by an international group of artists including Gemma Anderson, Lluis Barba, Jessie Bond, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Maisie Broadhead, Cecile Chong, Hector de Gregorio, Alice Evans, artist duo Ghost of a Dream, Kerry Jameson, Valerie Mary, Ali Miller, David Roche, Constance Slaughter, Antonia Tibble and Masaki Yada, all of whom address contemporary issues through their practices, often with irony, showing both reverence and irreverence to the Old Masters. The work will be displayed simultaneously in Kensington and the East End throughout October.
Young Masters starts on 7 October at the historic building of Sphinx Fine Art on Kensington Church Street, where selected work will be hung alongside Old Masters pictures, creating a fascinating dialogue between artists several centuries apart. The exhibition then opens on 15 October through 4 November at The Old Truman Brewery in London’s East End coinciding with Photomonth 2009.
The initiative, conceived during the last two years by Cynthia Corbett, Director of The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, will coincide with Frieze and Zoo 2009. Young Masters will also officially launch an Art Prize which will be continued by the Trafigura Foundation each year. The Art Prize, totaling £4,000, will be awarded to the most talented artist as judged by a panel of highly respected arts professionals. Young Masters is curated by Constance Slaughter and Beth Colocci and is supported by corporate sponsors Trafigura, AXA and Brakes Group.
The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, an international contemporary art gallery, represents emerging and newly established artists. corbettPROJECTS launched in 2004, focuses on curated solo and group installations, presenting an innovative programme of events in a diverse array of media including photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance art.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Trafigura knew of waste dangers
BBC Newsnight has uncovered evidence revealing that oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Trafigura knew of waste dangers
Trafigura had persistently denied that the waste was harmful but internal e-mails show staff knew it was hazardous.
On Wednesday, Newsnight learned that Trafigura has offered to pay damages to settle a class action brought on behalf of 31,000 who said they were injured.
Up until now Trafigura has refused to settle, denying it was to blame.
The news of the settlement came as a UN report on claims that people had fallen sick or died as a result of the dump was published.
The report says there is "strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping of the waste from the cargo ship".
The chemical waste came from a ship called Probo Koala and in August 2006 truckload after truckload of it was illegally fly-tipped at 15 locations around Abidjan, the biggest city in Ivory Coast.
In the weeks that followed the dumping, tens of thousands of people reported a range of similar symptoms, including breathing problems, sickness and diarrhoea.
Refinery by-product
The story began four years ago at an oil refinery in Mexico, owned by the state company Pemex, or PMI.
This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars
Trafigura e-mail
In its chemical processes the refinery was producing a by-product - coker naptha, a dirty form of gasoline which could not be treated on site.
The e-mails which Newsnight has obtained reveal that Trafigura executives realised they could make a fortune by buying the dirty Mexican oil for next to nothing.
One e-mail says: "This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars."
However, to sell it on at a profit, Trafigura first had to find a cheap way to clean the coker naptha and lower its sulphur levels.
Difficulties
Trafigura chartered the Probo Koala and while the ship was off the coast of Gibraltar poured tons of caustic soda and a catalyst into the dirty oil to clean it - a rough and ready process known as "caustic washing".
Watch Newsnight's May 2009 investigation
The method is cheap, but it generates such dangerous waste that it is effectively banned in most places around the world.
The e-mails obtained by Newsnight show that in the months before the waste was dumped the company knew about the difficulties they would face in disposing of the waste.
"This operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste'", one e-mail warns.
Another e-mail points out that "environmental agencies do not allow disposal of the toxic caustic".
The process left a toxic sulphurous sludge in the tanks of the Probo Koala.
Evidence seen by Newsnight shows that knowledge of the waste and problems getting rid of it went to the very top of Trafigura and the company's President Claude Dauphin.The Poor Mouth: Trafigura - Corporate Criminals
The Trafigura e-mails say that Mr Dauphin was urging his team to "be creative" in how they dealt with the hazardous waste.
The contractor that they found in the end was Solomon Ugburogbu, the owner of a company called Tommy, which had no facilities to handle hazardous waste.
Ugburogbu, is now serving a 20 year sentence for poisoning local people.
Lord Strathclyde severs links with oil trader Trafigura after waste scandal - Worldnews.com
Lord Strathclyde, leader of Conservative party in the Lords. Photograph: David Mansell The leader of the Conservative party in the Lords, Lord Strathclyde, is to sever his links with the controversial traders Trafigura. Evidence was disclosed in the Guardian today that the London-based firm has carried out a huge cover-up of its role in an African -dumping scandal.
