I happened to be talking to someone who works at one of the cultural institutions due to receive a slice of £10 million of BP’s money over the next five years. She was very pleased at the news, perhaps unsurprisingly, since this is her career and I imagine she’s passionate about it and about art itself. I alluded to the litany of concerns I have at the way BP is doing irreparable damage to the planet on so many levels.

"Well, find us another sponsor, and..."

"We’ll have to work together to make that happen," I replied, quickly, as she was getting off the bus.

Somehow this brief conversation managed to dishearten me more than the BP deal itself, news of which had filtered out of the British Museum much earlier that day. The British Museum is regarded, it seems, by BP as its private playground, where esteemed allies, possible collaborators, and lucky employees can gather, usually of an evening, to sink a glass or two of something elegant and fizzy, surrounded by treasures (possibly looted, possibly saved) of once mighty empires. This state of affairs is perhaps regarded wearily by some museum employees as an inevitable symptom of the neoliberalisation of culture, one that leaves a once bitter, but soon deadening aftertaste.

I live in a city, a country, a culture whose roots reach deep into exploitation and destruction: the seizing of land, the creation of brutalising empires (once national, now corporate), and the remorseless theft of resources. As so many supporters of oil sponsorship remind those of us who are deeply troubled by it (and by what it allows to continue), we are all compromised by fossil fuels, as well as capitalism itself. We’re likely to use more than our planetary share of fossil fuels, and are quite possibly basing a relatively privileged lifestyle on the suffering of others, perhaps nearby but more commonly on distant continents where the predominant skin colour is not white.

It’s important to be aware of these distressing truths, and even more important to act wherever we can to dismantle whatever privilege we may have, and of course to keep cutting the carbon. But complicity should never be taken as a compelling reason to stay away from the issues, safely cocooned in a hypocrisy-free bubble. If we left the protection of the planet and the struggle for the liberation of everything that lives to carbon-footprintless hermits living in their proverbial cave, the future would be looking far darker than it already does. And it does look dark, dammit.

Harking back to that conversation with the cultural worker, it strikes me that she may have found the Deepwater Horizon disaster as achingly distressing as I did. I made a conscious effort some time ago to turn my gaze away from those oiled seabirds whenever I could, even though images of them are plastered all over the Internet. Just the echo of knowing they were out there was enough motivation to spend at least some of my time doing this work. But I share the same desire as that of so many of my fellow Londoners to turn away from what is troubling, and to seek solace — ah, the irony! — in the arts, particularly the arts that may be politicised but still manage to offer a good escape. Stolen hours hollering with guitar or piano provide a canvas on which to pour out the despair, personal and planetary (I’ve lost the ability to tell the difference!), and sometimes even to alchemise it into something approaching joy.

Where I may differ from my fleeting cultural acquaintance is in a stubborn refusal to completely ditch the belief that not only is collective action necessary, but that it’s distinctly possible. Once, she may have stood on the streets and added her voice to those of so many others opposing war or injustice — but that was what seems like a lifetime ago. Maybe those acts of altruism and possibility were dashed, for myriad oft-delineated reasons, and now perhaps she has good reason to have abandoned belief in anything other than treating her loved ones lovingly, doing her work thoughtfully, and casting a jaundiced glance as little as she can bear at the bleak old world as it whirls onward.

I used to think that the vast and increasing distance between the ecocidal actions of BP et al. and their shiny rhetoric gave us an unparalleled opportunity to expose their psychopathic nature. But now I think most of us already have a strong sense of the deep seam of amorality that runs through such entities. The key is to allow the anger and sometimes unbearable sadness triggered by that knowledge to transform itself into strategic action that is always also from the heart. The alternative seems to be a steady diet of despair and self-medication.

Sometimes people afflicted by this overwhelming sense of disappointment, whose dreams seem dry, seek to drain those of others who still carry them. I have no idea if that’s the case from my brief interaction with this one person. At the end of our brief exchange, I tried, clumsily, to touch on the prospect of an alliance between insider and outsider, not having the time to add that "after all, we’re all in this together, breathing the same air," etc.

Such an alliance needs to comprise those working within these sponsored institutions, and all the people outside them who see them as a barometer of our society, with a move to a "culture beyond oil" allowing societal reappraisal of our relationship to fossil fuels (and corporations themselves). It also means, crucially, the participation of artists themselves. If we can all gather what’s left of our hope, or — more easily? — reach deep and reconnect with our interconnectness to whatever lives, we might build a beautiful alliance that refuses to accept the inevitability of the commodification of art, people, and life itself. From the outside we could provide solidarity for those within these institutions who might be risking their livelihoods by sticking their necks out, and we could do the same for artists who turn away from tainted art prizes out of principle. All of us could insist that public money — of which there is so much, but so much misuse — is directed into essential services, of which art is most certainly one.

These exhortations are of course ambitious to the point of grandiosity, but they remain possible. What stands between them and their realisation is only our incapacity to cultivate a sense deep within us that our fellows care as much as we do, and might be prepared to sink a little time and love into bringing them to pass.

Sam Chase is an inveterate ivory worrier, irregular street hollerer, sometime Occupier, and regular volunteer for the group Art Not Oil.