State of the art
Controversy has dogged Sir Nicholas’s career
Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of Arts Council England, is not one to shy away from a fight, so he is unlikely to be troubled by talk of causing “havoc” with his redistribution of public funds.
During a 29-year stint as director of the Tate Gallery, the 76-year-old, who oversaw the creation of Tate Modern, faced repeated campaigns for his sacking.
Until 2007, as chairman of the Turner Prize, Sir Nicholas championed abstract art and was accused of neglecting figurative art.
His selection of works often attracted controversy, and in particular his liking for the Britart of young British artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose pickled sharks and unmade beds were divisive.
Charles Thomson, the figurative artist, raised a petition calling for an end to Sir Nicholas’s tenure at the Tate because of his “policies of acquiring decaying sharks and tins of s---”.
Mr Thomson mocked him in a painting titled Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision, in which the director ponders red underwear on a washing line and asks: “Is it a genuine Emin (£10,000) or a worthless fake?”
Sir Nicholas’s refusal to drop BP as a sponsor of the Tate following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was in defiance of an 8,000-name petition in 2011.
When environmental protesters threw black liquid over Tate Britain, his response was that “you don’t abandon your friends because they have… a temporary difficulty”. Sir Nicholas, whose mother, Baroness Serota, was a health minister in Harold Wilson’s government, read economics at Cambridge before switching focus to history of art, taking a master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute in London where his thesis was on
J M W Turner.
In 1973, he was made director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford; in 1976 he moved to London’s Whitechapel Gallery and from there he won the coveted job at the Tate, from which he stepped down in 2017 to take on the Arts Council role. Knighted in 1999 and made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2013, he is also a senior independent director of the BBC board.