What happened to Tate Britain? How did it become the kindly killer of everything that was once exciting and dangerous in British art? In the 1990s, this neoclassical building, then just the Tate, was a stage for the new, the home of sensations, a place where provocative art punched you in the face. That era is currently memorialised in the gaping Duveen space in the middle of the museum, where Vong Phaophanit’s eerily beautiful Neon Rice Field, a long dreamy array of rice divided by strips of pink light, points the way to Rachel Whiteread’s towering cast of the underneath of a double staircase. Whiteread and Phaophanit were both nominated for the 1993 Turner prize: the first Turner that had to be seen, in the same way that back then the latest Martin Amis had to be read.
But today’s Tate Britain is where art goes to sleep. That’s largely because it is committed to a worthy view of art. It isn’t the ideals I object to but rather the stultifying fact that when you insist on art’s moral value, you make it predictable and dull. To try to pretend it still matters, Tate Britain ostentatiously “rehangs” its collection every few years. Not a single such rehang has ever made a convincing, coherent case for British art – and the latest is no exception. Maybe it doesn’t want to promote British art, for it seems to disapprove of much of it.
