A dizzying barrage of video images of late 20th-century Britain opens this celebration of one of the most influential and controversial publications of the age: The Face. Margaret Thatcher, Boy George, The Spice Girls, Oasis, Damien Hirst, you name them, are all there in Culture Shift, all set to a gleefully tacky synth-pop soundtrack that takes us straight to the moment of the magazine’s launch at the dawn of the Eighties.
That most scorned of decades is suddenly everywhere in art. And if Tate Britain’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain wants to rub our noses in the grim and gritty side of the Thatcher era, this show wants to put a big celebratory smile on our faces when we’re barely through the door. And in the early stages of the exhibition, at least, it’s almost impossible not to succumb.
