How Tate Modern took over from the British Museum
The Bankside gallery’s attendance figures have now eclipsed the BM’S. Serena Davies offers an explanation
Avariety of factors will have influenced this week’s news that Tate Modern’s attendance figures have for the first time eclipsed those of the British Museum (5.9million versus 5.8million for 2018). Tate put on a hugely popular Picasso exhibition, which added a pleasing half million to its tally. The British Museum has a tiresome bag checking policy that means tourists trickle rather than pour in, and have to stand in long queues waiting to do so. The hipsters loping their way down the slope to the Turbine Hall suffer no such indignity.
But there isn’t any doubt that the figures indicate a genuine triumph for Southwark’s former power station, a building that is possibly now more globally iconic than St Paul’s Cathedral, which it faces off across the Thames. Tate Modern’s status as an internationally recognised temple of modern art has been even further affirmed, and the British Museum’s status as an internationally recognised temple of, well, everything else that came before, is looking a bit dented.
Are the figures the right way round? Should more people be visiting the TM than the BM? The British Museum has 13million artefacts – there are only 70,000 across all the Tates (naturally neither institution can display anything more than a small percentage of these figures at any one time). The British Museum straddles work from 10,000BC until now. Tate Modern starts at 1900. There’s a decent argument that the British Museum’s vast tribute to the creativity of man is the most comprehensive in the world – only the Louvre and the diaspora of the Smithsonian Institution are on a comparable scale. But Tate does not have one of the world’s leading collections of modern art. Leader of the pack in this is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, with a queue behind it that includes Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
So by some definition this has to be a triumph of style over substance. Tate Modern indeed makes a feature of its architectural spectacle: it is mainly a vast empty hall, with some galleries to the side. In 2016 came the unveiling of Switch House, the new extension which is notable for its barrenness.
You could say that Tate Modern’s emphasis since the 2016 rehang on recently acquired and often recently made art from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe is a deliberate distraction from the fact it hasn’t got an era-defining Western artwork like Matisse’s The Dance (one in Russia, one in America) or Picasso’s Guernica (in Spain) to please the canonically minded.
And yet Tate Modern’s redefinition of itself as a litmus test for contemporary art right now, for the work from other continents that EH Gombrich and later historians of modernism rarely cared for, from the gender they failed to appreciate, is part of a broader shift in cultural understanding that is a necessary consequence of globalisation.
The British Museum’s great collection constitutes the wares of empire building, an empire which is gone. It is a museum that quite simply would not be possible, or appropriate, to create now. Tate Modern’s lack of interest in chronology, its emphasis on the primacy of the experience over objects, and its wish to connect multiple localities is tuned into that primary demand of this social media age that neglected voices are heard and their viewpoints given value. There is good reason to anticipate that when New York’s Moma unveils its own rehang later this year, it will follow in Tate Modern’s wake and emphasise a global perspective.
No one should wish the British Museum’s numbers to continue to wane. From the Egyptian mummies to the Portland Vase, it shows us not only what we were making in the past but what we thought about it. But Tate Modern has asserted itself as the museum of now – and the public have listened.