TATE BRITAIN NEEDS ITS IDENTITY BACK
In recent issues I’ve described how since 1945 the education, 404 Not Found
The sad truth now is that the Tate has become a gallery of contemporary art with a marginalised historical concession on the side, whereas its original function was the reverse of this. The revolution that has taken place for this to happen over the last half century is an object lesson in change by incremental stealth. It is the perfect demonstration of what Rudi Dutschke meant when, confronted with the fact that a successful immediate proletarian revolution was impossible in western Europe, he referred to the necessity to operate clandestinely from inside, a process he famously dubbed “the long march through the institutions”. This would, he predicted, lead to the eventual substitution of one establishment by another independent of any popular support. And in the case of the contemporary visual arts this means a far more repressive, hidebound and authoritarian regime than the one it replaced.
Writing in 1971 political scientist Leonard Schapiro observed: “[T]he true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” He was referring to Stalinism but he might just as easily have said it about an equally dictatorial State Art. Such is the blind faith in the New Scripture for Contemporary Art, and the impossibility of apostasy from it (like membership of the Euro the only exit from State Art is a door marked Disaster), that any attempt to question the evolving orthodoxy and monopoly has condemned any would-be non-conformist to immediate ostracism. The predictable chorus of positive opinion at the appointment of Dr Quack is evidence of this common fear of being targeted as a “jarring
dissonant” and the career disaster it portends.
With Dr Q’s appointment, and the earlier elevation of a contemporary art specialist to head Tate Britain, the takeover of the institutions is complete. We have arrived at Dutschke’s Year Zero. The art of Now has become its own justification, as if nothing before matters. This is the curious process by which an uncoupled past has become an irrelevance. If it goes in any direction at all the story of