• YOUR newspaper has referred, now and then, to protests against corporate sponsorship in art galleries and museums. BP and the Sacklers have been criticised by campaigners as hypocritical, and manipulating art as a smokescreen for brutal capitalism.

What about the latest “eco-terrorism”, which has involved shoving dirt onto pictures in galleries?  There is nothing new about defacing art to make a point. Iconoclasm was a feature of Byzantium, then of the Protestant Reformation.

I reckon that deliberately subversive artists such as the Milan-born maverick, Caravaggio, would have been shocked by the current art market. Art shouldn’t be about dollars, euros, and pounds. If art isn’t about the soul then it is nothing at all. Caravaggio might actually have agreed with demonstrators in aloof, conservative, places such as the V & A and the British Museum.

Auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, are full of filthy greed. Art is no longer pristine, celestial, and cosmic, it has become a grubby, soiled, “investment”. Let’s praise what the frail but feisty Nan Goldin did in the Guggenheim and the Met in New York. Without her art activism the Sackler dynasty, at the heart of the terrible opioid crisis, could still be posing as benefactors today.

Iconoclasm is itself a manner of artistic expression.

Sadly I think the real enemies are the museums that cage art and the dealers that exploit it.

ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI, W12