Some principles

Recently I read that the Tate group of British art galleries, which includes the prestigious Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, will no longer be accepting any gifts from one of its wealthiest sponsors, the Sackler family in the USA, because their money comes from the sale of the contested prescription painkiller, OxyContin. This is a remarkable decision which gave me a new slant in my thinking about dependencies in the arts sector in general and sponsorship of the arts in particular.

The name might not be familiar to you, but everyone probably knows this board game, in which one player annoys another by sending him back to start just before he reaches the next goal or perhaps when he is just a few moves away from winning the whole game. There are a lot of games that work like this, including Ludo, but only this one has the German name "Mensch ärgere dich nicht", which, as the title suggests, means “Man, don’t get angry”. Whoever thought out the name must have had either a great sense of humor or pedagogical intentions! Or maybe both?

Imagine somebody you don't know sends you an email asking you to talk about a painting you’ve never seen by an artist you’ve never heard about – with the proviso that all this will be filmed and the video of the encounter published later on in the internet. How would you react?