Scrutiny of arts funding is in the spotlight once more. Tate have recently appeared before the Information Tribunal following their refusal to declare the exact amount they receive in sponsorship from oil giants BP. The hearing is the result of the gallery's heavily redacted response to a Freedom of Information request made by Request Initiative, working with the art-activist campaign group Platform. It comes just days after a major interactive intervention organised by art activists took place at Tate Modern. In the tribunal itself, Tate admitted to fears that such protests “might intensify” if the actual sponsorship figures were made public.

We spoke to Hannah Davey of art-activist collective Liberate Tate and Kevin Smith of Platform about the ethics of corporate sponsorship and whether art and politics can ever really be separated.

How and why does it matter that the Tate receives funding from BP?

Hannah: Well, Tate actually gets less than around 0.5% of its total annual income from BP. But BP gets huge amounts of exposure in return, a disproportionate amount you might say. For example, its logo appears all over Tate spaces while ‘The BP Walk Through British Art’ (the recent rehang at Tate Britain) actually features the oil giant's name in its title. It's a way for BP to launder its image – to make people think less about the environmental destruction it causes all over the world and instead about how altruistic it is. We think that Tate is worth a lot more than that – that our cultural institutions are important and precious and shouldn't be used as a rag to wipe away dirt.