Friday, December 10, 2004
Why I hate the Tate Modern
Oh, you know this one: the crowds of people who are not so much interested in art as they are interested in being interested in art; the smugness of the visitors – look at me, I’m in an art gallery… Yeah, I really am that cool; the overwhelming stench of self-satisfaction; the fact that it’s much more a place to be seen in than anything else - a way to demonstrate hipness and broadmindedness - full of people trying to show how much their minds are blown by some minor Dali, now utterly irrelevant. And that’s about it, really.
But there’s also that it fails as a gallery. So much of what is there is only understandable in terms of what went before. The eternal problem of innovation is that the new is made redundant by what follows it: Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion is not as powerful once one has seen Alien. This problem is particularly acute when a piece of art is the diagram of an idea, without the fortuitous accident or unconscious touches that can make paintings so beguiling.* We cannot feel the shock of Duchamp’s Fountain anymore, we can only appreciate its significance; and perhaps wonder that he missed a trick by not having a fresh turd laid in the bowl every morning. So, on the South Bank we have a museum, and we visit it as cultural historians. Not without merit, of course, but it’s not the only game in town.
* Realising that I actually have far too much to say on this, I shall fatigue further in my forthcoming post, “Why I hate the Turner Prize.”
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Oh, you know this one: the crowds of people who are not so much interested in art as they are interested in being interested in art; the smugness of the visitors – look at me, I’m in an art gallery… Yeah, I really am that cool; the overwhelming stench of self-satisfaction; the fact that it’s much more a place to be seen in than anything else - a way to demonstrate hipness and broadmindedness - full of people trying to show how much their minds are blown by some minor Dali, now utterly irrelevant. And that’s about it, really.
But there’s also that it fails as a gallery. So much of what is there is only understandable in terms of what went before. The eternal problem of innovation is that the new is made redundant by what follows it: Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion is not as powerful once one has seen Alien. This problem is particularly acute when a piece of art is the diagram of an idea, without the fortuitous accident or unconscious touches that can make paintings so beguiling.* We cannot feel the shock of Duchamp’s Fountain anymore, we can only appreciate its significance; and perhaps wonder that he missed a trick by not having a fresh turd laid in the bowl every morning. So, on the South Bank we have a museum, and we visit it as cultural historians. Not without merit, of course, but it’s not the only game in town.
* Realising that I actually have far too much to say on this, I shall fatigue further in my forthcoming post, “Why I hate the Turner Prize.”
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