Protesters target BP art prize ceremony

LONDON (AP):

Environmental protesters demonstrated Tuesday outside a BP PLC-sponsored art awards ceremony, as a senior executive said the company deeply regretted the human and environmental tragedy caused by its huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

About a dozen demonstrators sporting white coveralls and surgical face masks and dubbing themselves the "Greenwash Guerrillas" distributed leaflets outside London's National Portrait Gallery, where the £25,000 BP Portrait Award was being handed out.

Inside, Iain Conn, the company's chief executive for refining and marketing, said the awards ceremony "comes at a very, very difficult time for BP".

"We are dealing with a tragedy both human and environmental," he said.

He said the disaster was something "we regret very deeply" and vowed BP would make changes so that it never happened again.

The prize, open to artists of any nationality and sponsored by BP for more than 20 years, was won by 63-year-old English painter Daphne Todd for a portrait of her 100-year-old mother's corpse on her deathbed.

Todd said BP's support for the arts was "fantastic."

"I know they haven't had a good press, they've had a bad press," she said. "But they have been philanthropic, and where else is that money going to come from?"

But as millions of gallons of oil gush into the waters of the Gulf, protesters are intensifying their calls for arts bodies to stop taking money from BP because of the environmental and economic devastation it has caused.