Even Tate knows it needs to change. This top-heavy montage of four museums really needs to scrutinise itself and ask hard questions about its aims and how it works – including why it often doesn’t. Apparently aware of the crisis, it hails its new director Jessica Morgan as “an agent of change”. Well that’s a relief. But is she really?
Morgan is a highly rated curator of contemporary art, recently leading the Dia Art Foundation in the US to great acclaim and with an earlier track record at Tate Modern itself. Yet these very strengths suggest she will stay within a groove that Tate is all too comfortable with. It’s unlikely she’s going to rush to put on a show about art and the Reformation, for instance.
This capacious institution loves to identify itself with new art but owns a lot of the old kind too. The Tate collection includes British art since 1500, but Tate Britain has become chronologically parched in its exhibitions, rarely going back into the Tudor or Stuart ages and mostly focusing on art since the Victorians. At least Gainsborough gets a show next year, but seriously, Tate needs a proper plan for its older British art. I hope Morgan will give this thought despite her background.
Not that Tate Modern is perfectly fine and dandy. When things go right they can be magnificent, like the current exhibition of Ana Mendieta’s shamanistic, myth-making visions. Yet alongside it is the museum’s disappointing, over-hyped Frida Kahlo show that was obviously problematic from an early stage. The question here is why no one raised the alarm: why there was no pre-mortem before the critics pronounced their postmortems? The same goes for last year’s dire Turbine Hall installation by Máret Ánne Sara. The faults of this installation must have been obvious but, somehow, nobody in Tate Modern seems to have said so.
These unforced errors, which have also happened at Tate Britain with its ludicrously over-attitudinising collection hang, suggest a real problem with self-questioning. Tate seems to have a culture of rigid self-belief and sees all criticism as enmity. This internal complacency or lack of democracy needs fixing fast. And the Tate brand itself needs work. “Brand” – there, I’ve said it. An art gallery should not be a brand. The transformation of Tate into its current form happened at the end of the 1990s in an era of hyper-marketing and PR-massaged cool. Today it’s almost as if Tate’s PR machine and branding determine its values: even the announcement of Morgan’s appointment comes with a long list of endorsements by artists – a totally unnecessary piece of pre-judging.
Morgan has to totally rethink Tate (maybe even allow it to be called “the” Tate). The outlets need serious attention. I like Tate St Ives but it’s arguably a rather cosy sideline. And of course, there’s the annual agony – the moribund Turner prize. Tate is too set in its ways, too dogmatic about championing “groundbreaking” art – and its curators are very confident they know what that looks like. But the idea that a museum should take sides and strike attitudes is wrong.
Tate needs to surprise us. Morgan will bring that fresh eye we are promised, even if she looks like a safe pair of hands who might bring more of the same. I hope she proves to be a revolutionary Trojan horse.
