Some sections of the media dismissed a press release distributed by the McLaren team last week.
The headline ‘Arts Council Collection teams up with the
McLaren group’ led some to believe that the rest of the document would outline a typical sponsorship or promotional deal between the two parties — hardly the stuff of a media scoop.
Team boss Ron Dennis, however, had revealed that he hoped displaying some of Britain’s top sculptures around the huge and impressive Woking factory would stimulate workers’ “individual creativity”.
It also emerges that, unlike the traditional team-sponsor arrangement of money in return for promotion, the only party forking out the cash for this arrangement is McLaren itself.
The team says it wants to help the Arts Council “increase its already important support of the young and emerging artists working in Britain”, while the English broadsheet newspaper The Guardian revealed that Dennis is an avid art aficionado and recreational collector.
The sum McLaren pays is unknown, but the Arts Council’s head Caroline Douglas confirmed that the money “comes without strings and simply enables us to do more of what we’ve always done”.
