Tate Modern’s 20th birthday
Twenty years ago last month, the Tate opened a new museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art in a disused power station at London’s Bankside. The success of this new institution was anything but guaranteed: sceptics questioned its £134m price tag, and even doubted the public’s appetite for a huge new modern art gallery. Yet Tate Modern would defy the naysayers and “change the landscape of London’s art scene”, said The Art Newspaper. Its unconventional architecture and attention-grabbing Turbine Hall commissions – notably Olafur Eliasson’s installation The Weather Project, which “wowed” all who saw it in 2003 – quickly made it the UK’s leading cultural destination, and helped to dispel the intellectual snobbery that previously had surrounded so much modern art. The museum has become one of the world’s “perennially most popular art spaces”, attracting some six million visitors per year.
Tate Modern has staged a series of definitive retrospectives of great modern artists, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times: Picasso, Matisse, Yayoi Kusama. More than that, though, it has “changed the way the game was played”. Its collection of modern art is paltry by comparison to, say, New York’s MoMA, but Tate Modern got around that by dumping the usual museum layout – a good collection, ordered chronologically – in the Thames, and making “the building itself... the heart of the Tate Modern experience”, filling its cavernous spaces with big, eye-catching works of contemporary art. Tate’s attempts to make itself accessible have sometimes served to infantilise visitors, rather than educate: in 2006, for example, the artist Carsten Höller filled the museum’s Turbine Hall with “silver helterskelters”. Ultimately, though, for better or for worse, “overstating the impact of Tate Modern is a challenge”.