ABOVE: Chris Ofili’s work The Upper Room (1999-2002). The recent publication of some emails relating to the Tate’s acquisition of the work have raised some hackles.

Say you own a large and popular football team. Say one of the many co-owners of that team has a son who wishes to be a football player. Say, even, that that co-owner suggests, quite politely, that perhaps you would like to hire his son for, oh, £700,000. Say that the son is a perfectly talented football player, probably worthy of inclusion on the team. Do you say yes, given the position and stature of the co-owner?

Well, you probably know where this is going, and it didn’t really need that long and wheezy metaphor to get there: The Tate Britain, it was recently revealed by the Telegraph, this year purchased a work by British 1998 Turner Prize-winner Chris Ofili, The Upper Room. Bully for them all, you might say. Well, it’s complicated by the fact that Mr. Ofili is a trustee on the Tate’s board, and mixing those two roles—buyer (trustee) and seller (artist)—seems to many observers unfair. The Telegraph retrieved some delicately-worded emails sent by Ofili’s dealer, Victoria Miro, to Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, stressing the importance of the purchase, trying to speed it along, and politely declining to drop the £700,000 price. While there seems to our eyes to be no cut-and-dried proof of any sinister shenanigans, this is exactly the kind of distracting public relations mess that can embarrass an artistic institution for years and erode public confidence. Ofili’s term, by the way, is up on November 21, 2005, a scant 27 days from now. Wouldn’t it have been so much less stressful simply to wait and buy the piece next year?

LINK: The Telegraph > Tate paid £700,000 for trustee’s work ‘after being told he needed the money’