{"id":93517,"date":"2025-05-11T19:55:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T19:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/93517\/"},"modified":"2025-05-11T19:55:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T19:55:09","slug":"tate-britain-is-forcing-gallery-visitors-to-confront-history-and-social-issues-could-it-be-turning-people-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/93517\/","title":{"rendered":"Tate Britain is forcing gallery visitors to confront history and social issues. Could it be turning people off?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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<\/p>\n

Tate Britain could not stand more proudly on the bank of the river Thames, a grand neoclassical monument to Britain\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Visitor numbers have only recovered to 79 per cent of prepandemic levels, and the last financial year saw a deficit of \u00a39-million. Admission to the <\/b>permanent collection is free, but the shows are not, so ticket sales and philanthropy comprise much of its funding. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of four publicly funded Tate galleries \u2013 a network that also includes Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives \u2013 which are collectively down 2.2 million visitors in the past five years and recently announced a 7-per-cent cut to their workforces. <\/p>\n

Critics within the arts world say audiences have become alienated by a tendency among curators \u2013 at the Tate and elsewhere \u2013 to regard museums and galleries as a platform for social change rather than places of artistic and historical appreciation. <\/p>\n

The falling numbers and concerns about its direction have taken the shine off Tate Modern\u2019s 25th anniversary on Monday, May 12, even if its reputation for innovation remains largely intact. <\/p>\n

\u201cAudiences are often treated as a problem to be educated rather than a public to be entertained,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think the general public are finally saying, \u2018Why am I being spoken to like this?\u2019 Because this is happening across so many organizations, galleries and institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Kay points to surveys that show audiences aren\u2019t keen on art institutions leading on social issues. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s ethical standards. <\/b><\/p>\n

The Tate galleries may be world famous, but at home Tate Britain in particular has found \u2013 or forced \u2013 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<\/a> that a woman is defined by biological sex, rather than identity, under U.K. equalities law.<\/p>\n

Glasgow\u2019s celebrated Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, founded in 1901, attracted criticism for a new permanent exhibition opened last year that highlights the city\u2019s links to slavery and empire. Nigel Biggar, professor emeritus of theology at the University of Oxford, said it \u201cdistorted history\u201d by exaggerating Glasgow\u2019s role in the trade and by ignoring the contribution of Scotland and Britain to abolition.<\/p>\n

The Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester, which has a 60,000–<\/b>piece collection of art, sculptures and textiles, has a new code of conduct that requires staff and visitors to \u201crecognise their privilege\u201d and accept that \u201cwe all have boundaries both physically and mentally.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cgrowing obsession with identity politics and the dour exhibition-making that results from it,\u201d which he wrote was partially to blame for a decline in visitors. \u201cPeople don\u2019t go to art galleries to be lectured or turned into better citizens. They go to be transported,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Art critics panned Tate Britain\u2019s 2023 rehanging of its permanent collection \u2013 a major undertaking for a gallery of its stature \u2013 for losing a sense of wonder in art. Jonathan Jones of the left-leaning Guardian newspaper said that \u201ctoday\u2019s Tate Britain is where art goes to sleep. That\u2019s largely because it is committed to a worthy view of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cflattering portraits, scenes of contented workers, and idyllic landscapes,\u201d when in fact \u201cBritish society, both here and across an expanding empire, is far from cohesive or peaceful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy advice,\u201d said Roger Turner, a private tour guide leading a party of six from a suburban London church around the permanent collection recently, \u201cis not to look at the labels. These information boards are essentially propaganda. They prevent people from looking at the paintings and appreciating them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tate Britain suffers its own particular discomfort over the slave trade, which is addressed on its website and in written displays at the gallery. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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: \u201cWhile 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was challenging and provocative, just as art should be,\u201d Ms. Hesketh said. For her, a trip to a gallery shouldn\u2019t be weighed down by historical baggage. \u201cWe live in the era of guilt, and that applies to art too. It\u2019s nice to just take a break and appreciate the art.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, March 25, 2019. The Tate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,9885,8047,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-93517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-aud-headline","11":"tag-aud-url","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114490961109449326","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}