Dear Tate Modern,
First, and most important, happy birthday! Pop the corks and toot the horns! A quarter century is an exciting age. Lots ahead, and lots behind. I will, of course, be giving you advice on how to make your golden anniversary even more successful than your silver, but before that savagery begins let’s share a hug across the ether. You’ve done astonishingly well in your 25 years. You’re a cultural triumph. Bravo.
Second, I owe you an apology. When you finally closed your sexy glass doors after that tumultuous opening party in May 2000 — remember the brass band from Stockport playing acid house music? Remember the German modern ballet about Scott of the Antarctic? — I was one of the more grudging visitors swaying out of the brutalist basilica of Bankside. I admit, too, that it was me who could be heard muttering something about pale pachyderms as I stumbled along the heaving river walk. How wrong can a man be?
My main worry was that I didn’t believe Britain was ready for a giant museum devoted to contemporary art. Having lived through all the cultural giggling that preceded the opening of Bankside — the relentless front-page sniping at “modern art”; the countless formaldehyde gags; the constant referencing of “the emperor’s new clothes” — I could not imagine Tate Modern winning national applause and pulling in the crowds. The French could do it. But could we?
Tony Blair, the grinning prime minister of the time, had gone fully Gallic on us and heaped a huge tonnage of symbolic responsibility on your shoulders. Tate Modern had been tasked with reforming the image of Britain, pointing to a new cultural future and dispelling the millennial fears that were swirling round us about clocks stopping, computers failing and the end of the world being nigh.
Your masterstroke was to ignore all that. Instead you rewrote the art gallery code of conduct and turned yourself into a house of fun. Not just then, but for the next 20 years! Outside Bankside, Iraq was invaded, the twin towers were blown up, London was bombed, the Middle East exploded, the global economy was murdered, the climate was crapped on, the world grew worse and worse. But at Tate Modern the thrills kept coming.
Remember the communal picnics we had splayed out on the ground of your giant Turbine Hall, watching Olafur Eliasson’s setting sun and seeing ourselves reflected endlessly in the mirror on the roof? Remember the silver slides built by Carsten Höller and the joy of sliding down them and screaming? Remember the swings in the Turbine Hall, the competition to see who could go highest?
In the old days people used to go to art galleries to search for knowledge and spiritual highs. But that turned out to be a 20th-century thing: civilisationally vintage and old fashioned. In the new century acquiring knowledge was something we left to computers and search engines. We humans, meanwhile, found our thrills in the opposite direction, wandering through Tate Modern’s many rooms of mystery, encountering the inexplicable, the illogical, the senseless. You were our new Alton Towers and we loved the rides.
This new gallery’s ambition to entertain rather than teach had another important consequence: it allowed you to ignore the gaping holes in your collection. The Tate holdings, we used to complain, did not include enough good examples to tell the story of modern art comprehensively. But that was only a problem if your ambition was to tell the story of modern art comprehensively! If you switched ambitions, and sought instead to keep people involved and amused by bombarding them from all angles with contemporary art, it ceased to be a problem and became a plus.
The succession of shows you mounted devoted to the giants of modern art was also mightily impressive. The thrilling bigness you brought to art’s party with your looming cathedral presence seemed to enlarge the impact of your best events: Louise Bourgeois and her giant spider; Frida Kahlo and her parrots; Rothko, Pollock, Newman. They were among the greatest shows I have seen. I don’t expect to enjoy such an exciting sequence of summaries again.
All of which brings us to the commencement of your downturn around 2019. Until then you had surprised us with your achievements. Your visitor numbers were astronomical. Six million mothers, kids, grannies, wheelchair users, art lovers and art haters were pouring annually down your famous entry ramp. You had become far and away the best-attended museum of modern art in the world. When you opened up a whole new slab of Bankside and turned it into the Blavatnik Building, named after the generous Ukrainian-born benefactor, you even managed to grow bigger. It was all looking good. Then Covid struck.
All the big London galleries were unprepared for the disaster, but you seemed less prepared than the rest. The spectacular size of Bankside was an obvious burden. As visitor numbers sank, large numbers of staff had to be laid off. The looming Blavatnik Building, with its bleak and gloomy spaces, became somewhere art lovers avoided in case there were serial killers lurking in its basement. The air began seeping out of Tate Modern’s balloon.
But not all the seepage can be blamed on Covid. Before the pandemic there was already a tangible dampening of your mood; a sense of lost excitement. The famous Turbine Hall installations stopped being memorable and started to look underfunded. In recent years I remember only Kara Walker’s spurting slave fountain having a real impact. That needs sorting. Pull open that thick address book of yours and phone some giants — Jeff Koons, Yoko Ono, Anselm Kiefer — to replace the minnows. A gigantic space needs gigantic imaginings.
A second problem is your growing obsession with identity politics and the dour exhibition-making that results from it. Sorry, but people don’t go to art galleries to be lectured or turned into better citizens. They go to be transported. You yourself convinced me of that.
As a young institution you thrilled your audience with unexpected sights. We followed you happily down the path of aesthetic excitement because it was missing from our lives. The insistence on worthy causes that characterises Tate Modern today might work if the only people who went to galleries were art world types. But they’re not. Less right-on-ness and more showbiz, please.
Another issue is what I can only describe as cultural snobbishness. Basically, you approve of some artists, but not of others. It’s something you could sense even before Bankside opened. You never did like the YBAs — Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn — and seemed always to prefer obscure German graph makers whose work was freighted with rigour and difficulty. It was and is a missed trick. The YBAs changed art. You may never have understood their international importance but everyone else did. Instead of boring us with Sigmar Polke and Tacita Dean you could be challenging us with Sarah Lucas, Mat Collishaw, the Chapman brothers. And while you’re at it, throw in some Grayson Perry. He’s a proven crowd-pleaser. So please some crowds.
There are also fundamental problems caused by your separation from Tate Britain. You used to be a single institution, charged jointly and a tad weirdly with catering for two constituencies: modern art and British art. When you split apart in 2000 you were left with lingering problems. Tate Britain never really wanted to be British and yearned to become Tate Modern II. Tate Modern, meanwhile, developed a phobia about showing British art. It’s something you need to inoculate yourself against. Celebrate Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Paula Rego at Bankside. They deserve it.
Magic away these issues and the visitor numbers will revive, I promise. Above all, remember the reasons for your initial success: people came to you for artistic excitement and aesthetic release from the world’s problems, not to be reminded of them.
Oh, and a final point. Pay your curators more! I dream of going to a private view and not having a Tate curator come up to me and complain about how little they receive compared with the Tate management. Better wages means better curators!
All my love, Waldemar.