The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, March 25, 2019. The Tate galleries may be world famous, but at home Tate Britain in particular has found – or forced – its way into the divisive debate around colonial history, racial guilt and the wider cultural wars.ANDY HASLAM/The New York Times News Service
Tate Britain could not stand more proudly on the bank of the river Thames, a grand neoclassical monument to Britain’s golden age and a repository of the best of British art from 1500 to the present day. But within its august walls the mood is not as bright as the lovely spring sunshine London has enjoyed for the past few weeks.
Visitor numbers have only recovered to 79 per cent of prepandemic levels, and the last financial year saw a deficit of £9-million. Admission to the permanent collection is free, but the shows are not, so ticket sales and philanthropy comprise much of its funding.
It’s one of four publicly funded Tate galleries – a network that also includes Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives – which are collectively down 2.2 million visitors in the past five years and recently announced a 7-per-cent cut to their workforces.
Critics within the arts world say audiences have become alienated by a tendency among curators – at the Tate and elsewhere – to regard museums and galleries as a platform for social change rather than places of artistic and historical appreciation.
The falling numbers and concerns about its direction have taken the shine off Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary on Monday, May 12, even if its reputation for innovation remains largely intact.
“Audiences are often treated as a problem to be educated rather than a public to be entertained,” said Rosie Kay, a choreographer who started an organization called Freedom in the Arts in 2023 to protect free expression in the industry after she was forced out of her own dance company following a complaint by members of the company about her views on gender.
“And I think the general public are finally saying, ‘Why am I being spoken to like this?’ Because this is happening across so many organizations, galleries and institutions.”
Ms. Kay points to surveys that show audiences aren’t keen on art institutions leading on social issues.
Just 22 per cent of more than 1,000 people surveyed by think tank More in Common said museums should spend more time on equity and diversity issues. Only 23 per cent agreed that museums should interpret historical exhibits using today’s ethical standards.
The Tate galleries may be world famous, but at home Tate Britain in particular has found – or forced – its way into the divisive debate around colonial history, racial guilt and the wider cultural wars, which has only intensified with the recent Supreme Court ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex, rather than identity, under U.K. equalities law.
Glasgow’s celebrated Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, founded in 1901, attracted criticism for a new permanent exhibition opened last year that highlights the city’s links to slavery and empire. Nigel Biggar, professor emeritus of theology at the University of Oxford, said it “distorted history” by exaggerating Glasgow’s role in the trade and by ignoring the contribution of Scotland and Britain to abolition.
The Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester, which has a 60,000–piece collection of art, sculptures and textiles, has a new code of conduct that requires staff and visitors to “recognise their privilege” and accept that “we all have boundaries both physically and mentally.”
Apart from the bureaucratic mindset, it is the lack of nuance that most exasperates critics. Waldemar Januszczak, the influential art writer, complained in The Sunday Times recently of the Tate’s “growing obsession with identity politics and the dour exhibition-making that results from it,” which he wrote was partially to blame for a decline in visitors. “People don’t go to art galleries to be lectured or turned into better citizens. They go to be transported,” he added.
Art critics panned Tate Britain’s 2023 rehanging of its permanent collection – a major undertaking for a gallery of its stature – for losing a sense of wonder in art. Jonathan Jones of the left-leaning Guardian newspaper said that “today’s Tate Britain is where art goes to sleep. That’s largely because it is committed to a worthy view of art.”
Several commentators took issue with the large text introductions on the wall of each room and the labels next to paintings in the 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century rooms of the collection. They typically contain three to four paragraphs of social history with repeated mentions of the slave trade, the great wealth of the landed classes who profited from empire and then a line or two about where the artists in the room fitted in. Commentary about style and craft is noticeable by its absence.
Artists working 300 to 400 years ago are often held to the standards of today. At Tate Britain, masters such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and George Stubbs are chided for painting “flattering portraits, scenes of contented workers, and idyllic landscapes,” when in fact “British society, both here and across an expanding empire, is far from cohesive or peaceful.”
“My advice,” said Roger Turner, a private tour guide leading a party of six from a suburban London church around the permanent collection recently, “is not to look at the labels. These information boards are essentially propaganda. They prevent people from looking at the paintings and appreciating them.”
Tate Britain suffers its own particular discomfort over the slave trade, which is addressed on its website and in written displays at the gallery.
Originally called the Tate Gallery, it was founded by a legacy from Henry Tate, who made his fortune as a sugar refiner whose company later merged into the global giant Tate & Lyle. As the gallery notes, Mr. Tate may have begun his business a couple of decades after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, but his industry was rooted in slavery.
The gallery was unable to provide anyone for an interview for this article. A statement from a spokesperson focused on visitor numbers rather than culture: “While tourist visits to our galleries have not yet fully returned to pre-pandemic levels, Tate has been staging exhibitions at other museums around the world to reach an extra million people internationally each year. Tate is embarking on an ambitious plan for growth.”
Outside the Tate, Fionna Hesketh, 64, and her husband, Phil Walters, 73, enjoyed a retrospective show of the contemporary British artist Ed Atkins, best known for computer-generated videos and animations.
“It was challenging and provocative, just as art should be,” Ms. Hesketh said. For her, a trip to a gallery shouldn’t be weighed down by historical baggage. “We live in the era of guilt, and that applies to art too. It’s nice to just take a break and appreciate the art.”