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Should Serota Serve Another Seven Years? Like Robert Mugabe, Nicholas Serota fought a victorious civil war and now nothing save a bullet, it seems, is going to shift the bastard. Early in his directorship he won The War of the Cutting Edge and even though his cause is now dead in the water, he’s sticking by it. And how. He’s going to inflict it upon us because it’s his damn ball and he won it and he’s keeping it and he doesn’t want anyone else playing with it or popping it. Like Blair, to whom he sucked up and by whom he was rewarded for going along with the crassly populist New Labour agenda, what Serota was selling us was all spin, eye-catching initiatives and forms of words. Of substance there was nothing. Serota settled quickly into power and however badly he uses it none of those below him has the bottle to question his authority. So indistinguishable is he from his position that life without the job must now seem a terrifyingly empty prospect to him. Such possessiveness of office is an affliction conspicuous in many of recent influence. And Serota’s fear of retirement can not have been assuaged by recently having his worst shivering nightmare played out before his eyes: no way is he going to end up like the de-frocked and hissy Norman Rosenthal, now reduced to being just another bum on the street. Perhaps the Mugabe analogy is a tad cruel – as far as I know Serota hasn’t yet starved anyone to death, except aesthetically of course, where he has presided over a famine of Old Testament dimensions – but tyranny is what his directorship feels like. Serota’s autocracy over visual art affairs feels like a regime. It feels like a political orthodoxy which can’t – won’t – be removed, all opposition either ignored or intimidated and disarmed by fear and the veiled threat of privileges withdrawn. Such is his unquestioned authority one almost expects – chilling thought – George W Serota Jr to be conjured from behind those baggy pants. Sadly, power today is coveted by the vain rather than the good, and the exercise of it becomes for many a dangerous habit for which the only cure is a straitjacket and gag. No one, it seems, volunteers to relinquish position. Blair went because even he couldn’t drag it out any longer. And having said he would go four years ago, Ken Livingstone was destroyed by complacency, an unprepossessing self-importance and a superglue attachment to the big seat. Now, like terminally wounded animals, both ex-prime minister and ex-mayor clamour pathetically towards any remnant of the permanent limelight they once enjoyed. At least we were able to vote Livingstone out but no such option obtains where the tyrant quangocrat Serota is concerned. His reappointment for a fourth seven-year term is a foregone conclusion. Why does one almost expect him, Chavez-like, to succumb completely to his amour-propre and proclaim himself Director For Life? On August 31st, 2009 Serota’s Tate contract ends. He will have served 21 years and be 63 years old. (Of the eight Tate directors in the 20th century only John Rothenstein enjoyed a longer stint – 26 years.) He was first appointed in 1988 for seven years with extensions granted in 1995 and 2002. Requested to provide clarification of their intentions regarding the incumbent Director, the Tate’s Trustees stated in 2006 that a decision concerning post-2009 would be taken in 2007. It wasn’t and a decision is now to be made, we are told, by this August. No other candidates are in the frame and it is unlikely that Trustees effectively hand-picked by Serota himself will disoblige their Godfather. We have come to know over recent years what a servile clique of placemen Tate Trustees are. In such circumstances Serota will remain untouchably in place for as long as he chooses. One trustee Serota won’t now be able to rely on is Melanie Clore. Three issues ago we reported here how this Sotheby’s director sat in a Trustees’ meeting at which it was announced there would be a Peter Doig retrospective at the Tate. Sotheby’s deal in works by that painter and she did not declare a conflict of interest. Her solicitor, Clifford Chance, wrote an amusing long letter to The Jackdaw culminating in a threat of action if we ever repeated such scurrilities. See you in court Cliff! Clore has recently resigned after only one term, and not a minute too soon. Hers was a reckless and unnecessary appointment in the first place. Among his other egregious failings, Serota has been in office while scandal after scandal of his making has enveloped the Trustees which have resulted in official censurings of the Tate on at least two occasions. He has also himself been caught out misleading us on other occasions. All regimes who outstay their welcome become first casual then accident prone. Serota’s record in office has some merit and, my word, haven’t we all been forced to acknowledge it by his many friends in high places and inside the media. In what is a perversion of scholarly values, no director is these days considered to have succeeded unless presiding over expensive extension to the fabric they inherited. Thus, Serota is the consummate empire builder. He can’t stop expanding and is reported to enjoy schmoozing the rich to make it all possible. He opened Tate St Ives in 1993 which was already under discussion during the previous directorship of the more modest scholar/prof Alan Bowness. Housed in a vile building which for an unfathomable reason was designed to echo the gasometer which had previously occupied the site, the St Ives satellite is impractical as a gallery but has been reportedly a popular and lucrative addition to the Third World Cornish economy. Serota’s greatest coup has been the separation of 20th century art and the historical British collections at Millbank by opening Tate Modern in 2000. This conversion of a post-war power station cost £150 million, £52 million of it awarded by the recently established National Lottery. As money from private sources failed to materialise in the quantities required grandiose original plans were incrementally scaled back. Here was a distinctive behemoth amended into a depressing, poky, grey place art lovers loathe but which is popular with tourists and children, not least because of its adaptation in recent years into a free-for-all fairground. Annual attendance – boosted by its sideshow attractions – is claimed at 4 million per annum, though this is almost certainly an exaggeration designed to impress upon arts ministers the popularity of contemporary art, which in truth enjoys no significant following anywhere except at Tate Modern. Bankside, by the way, has its own director but, as Tate insiders are only too willing to whisper off the record, this unfortunate, leashed Iberian has never been allowed to run so much as the coffee machine. Tate Britain was renovated, again unimpressively with a staircase of bare, municipal hideousness. Sold to us at the time as architecture it could in truth barely be described as ‘building’. The collection at Millbank has been annually changed and chopped about leading to the bewilderment of regular visitors. One pleasure of galleries is the certainty of revisiting old friends, but this is impossible when great works are on some curatorial whim dispatched indefinitely to the bowels. One no longer knows where anything is. There is also a lack of resolution about where recent art should be shown. Surely it should be in its spiritual home at Bankside, but it isn’t. Although one half of the collection has in theory decamped downstream, the national British collection still seems as cramped and inadequate as ever. Rooms vacated by the chain of 20th century ‘isms’ have been replaced by the new orthodoxy of Contemporary State Art, whose noisy, sprawling stunts require acres of room in order to show almost nothing. In what has seemed to be an endorsement of mediocrity, these galleries now exhibit work which is, on the face of it, no better in quality than is visible in hundreds of private galleries across London. Always in the past the assumption was that the Tate exhibited the best but nowadays it is just another contemporary art outlet. There is a painful irony here. By its promotion of the cutting edge, Serota’s Tate created the chimerae of the so-called ‘young British artists’. This group came to prominence coincident with the Director’s own ascendancy. You could say that they were in large part his invention. But the most famous pieces by these same artists, which Serota did so much to hype and brand, are not in the Tate’s collection. So successful was institutional validation of these few that their prices rocketed way beyond public galleries’ ability to afford them. For all the many thousands of new works Serota has acquired in his 20 years you will look in vain for the telling pieces of recent British art. He has, therefore, effectively done nothing to improve the second-rate collection he inherited which is still conspicuously missing key works. If anything he’s watered down the national collection with bulk purchases of fashionable work, much of which is undeserving of its place, and which, on purchase, was puffed with absurd and spurious significance. And all this despite his insistent, daily bleating about institutional poverty. Am I alone in being sick of hearing his whingeing voice? No wonder he is now peddling schemes to build yet another annexe, this time to Tate Modern for a further £215 million. It will show excerpts from the tons of recent material he’s come by. And more than anything else, this is among the main reasons why Serota should be thanked for his efforts and packed off to the House of Lords, if this is the price we have to pay to be shot of him. This new structure is an unnecessary and shameless attempt to steal ‘Olympic’ limelight for himself. We have no need of more centralisation – he has said so himself. Half of the existing Bankside is anyway kept empty seemingly only so it can play host to lavish parties. If Serota’s legacy were to be measured by square-footage, acquisitions made and wine bottles emptied he has been the most successful director of any museum in history. There have been a mixed bag of exhibitions, some marvellous and unforgettable others not. In truth, the least we can expect is the occasional revelation when a director has at his disposal a staff currently fast approaching a thousand. Dominant in the exhibition programme, and the platform most associated with Serota himself, is the Turner Prize, which, again, was inherited from his predecessor and reconfigured so it emerged as the annual flagship for State Art. More than anyone Serota is the Julius II of State Art. State Art is the name I give to the establishment church of new art, the religion which worships unquestioningly novelty and new media while publishing no criteria for any judgements involved. In essence, it is a stitch-up of conspiring interests between the Tate, the Arts Council, the British Council, the major auctioneers, a dozen commercial art galleries and a handful of critics. As far as State Art is concerned everyone and everything else can go get fucked. The rest of us spectate with bemused fascination wondering how such shallow trash could have taken over the world of art to the exclusion of any of the many styles and mediums of which this establishment disapproves. Unfortunately, State Art can only survive while there is a promise that understanding may eventually dawn on the unbelieving. But we’ve had decades of it and the majority are as dismissive, indifferent and uncomprehending as they always were. After twenty years of their pleading our indulgence, State Art’s time has run out. It has become as tedious and predictable as any academy of the past ever did, though much much sooner. As an example of widespread indifference, the Times announced this year’s Turner Prize shortlist with under two column inches on page 26. Elsewhere, we are informed almost daily in the newspaper columns of those with open invitations to the Tate’s private ‘events’ that Serota has led us into a promised land of unprecedented energy and challenging – State Art’s mot juste – innovation. Like museum attendance figures this is a monstrous deception. In visual art we are living through the most reactionary era for 150 years. Virtually nothing of any trailblazing originality has been produced under the auspices of State Art. Being theoretically in thrall to Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol, the stuff dished up by Turner Prize nominees was never anything but conservative and often outrageous only in its unapologetic plagiarism. It constituted merely the reheating of yesterday’s leftovers abandoned as dead by far shrewder operators. The only aspect impressively new about State Art has been the marketing of it – undoubtedly a class performance. Serota has been the architect not of great art but of a business plan. He put everything in place, the PR and even the language (bollocks for the most part), but even he, with the Arts Council (where he had spent his early career), the British Council and Government Art Collection all sewn into his schemes, even he couldn’t create the artists which justified the vanloads of public cash thrown at them. The great symbol of Serota’s failure was the Turner Prize retrospective held at Tate Britain last winter. Each Turner Prize winner was represented by a major work. This should have been the apogee of his time in office, the fanfare of his triumph. But not a single masterwork was on display and, to add insult to injury, nobody went. There were more attendants than visitors. If this flop was the best work of the last 20 years then we’ve definitely been sold a pup. Also, Serota’s great claims for the popularity of contemporary British art were ignominiously shot down in flames. Like all orthodoxies State Art has become dull but we are unlikely to discover anything else until Serota is wrestled off the stage. His period has been one of considerable fascination for reasons other than the art it produced, but it is now time for another to offer an alternative picture. Everywhere lies evidence that the party times are over. A less decadent and superficial era is beginning. Serota’s time is up. He should go quietly now. David Lee | |||||
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