Charlotte Higgins (How Nicholas Serota changed Britain, 22 June) wonders if Nicholas Serota’s revolution is in danger of being reversed. One can only hope so. Serota’s single-minded promotion of so-called “cutting edge” art at Tate Modern has resulted in a stranglehold of such art in most galleries in the public realm. It has, in fact, become the new academicism, as rigid and unshakeable as that of the 19th century. Any kind of contemporary art which does not comply with the rule that it must be “progressive and challenging” is dismissed as nostalgic, backward and unimportant.
The sort of shows put on in Tate Modern are legitimised by calling them “art”, but a venue where things are “fun, and social, and cool … [an] immersive drama” might be a funfair or a rock concert rather than an art gallery, where quiet, contemplative looking is no longer approved.
Higgins asserts that “an institution whose job it is to amass new art works will always be faced with the fact that something later judged to be a masterpiece may be widely seen at the time of its making as “bewildering – or plain rubbish”. This notion has so scared curators that art collections made over the last half century are beginning to be seen as just the opposite – the story of modern art turned on its head.
I am a fervent opponent of Brexit, which does indeed reflect nostalgic and regressive attitudes; but the association of “progressive” art with internationalism and commercialism is not a valid argument for its promotion in exclusion of any other sort of contemporary art in public collections.
Contemporary art in galleries nationwide is now of such conformity in its striving to be “challenging” that it is simply tedious. For this, Nicholas Serota is much to blame,
Valerie Barden
South Molton, Devon
