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Which comes first, the gallery or the art? On the same day in December, the government announced official backing for two major building projects. One was Herzog & de Meuron’s new extension to Tate Modern; the other was a trio of American-style ‘Titan’ jails for 2,500 inmates, architects unnamed. Both projects are slated for completion in 2012. In the prisons’ case, the date is presumably a coincidence, unless Tessa Jowell has a secret contingency plan that if the Olympic Village isn’t finished on time the London Titan will take the overflow. In the Tate’s case, it’s an obvious attempt to attract the sort of cultural, media and sporting tourist who thinks the object of a gallery visit is the gallery. While the Vatican is still debating whether to declare God’s Architect Antonio GaudÌ a saint, the art world has happily gone ahead with canonising its favoured architects during their lifetimes. The sainted names of Gehry, Piano, Nouvel, Ando, Foster, Rogers, Libeskind, Koolhaas and Hadid - now joined by the newly canonised Herzog & de Meuron - are guaranteed to bring down divine blessings on any new cathedral to art. To be on the safe side, the Abu Dhabi Tourism Development Investment Corporation has invoked the aid of no fewer than four - the blessed Gehry, Nouvel, Ando and Hadid – in its holy mission to turn Saadiyat Island off the Emirate’s coast into a place of cultural pilgrimage by 2012. You may have noticed that in news reports of such building projects, the costs and square footage are always mentioned first, and the art last. That’s because, as often as not, there isn’t much. The first priority is to get bloody building up; after that the art can take its chances. No sooner had the municipality of Middlesbrough unveiled its swanky new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art last year than it was running cap in hand to the Art Fund begging for money for more art to fill it. Its grant of £1m under the new Art Fund International scheme will apparently be spent on work by contemporary North and South American artists of ‘varying degrees of renown’. Why, particularly? Because £1m won’t buy much these days, and they’re desperate. The more new art galleries go up, the harder it gets to fill them. Fortunately it’s a problem those with money can buy themselves out of. Last year Abu Dhabi got out the chequebook and signed deals with both the Louvre and the Guggenheim to supply the necessary. The former will be paid $1.3bn for managing and supplying the Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi, $520m of it for the use of its name. [The Louvre also has a $6.4m deal to fill echoing new gallery spaces in Atlanta (Piano) and Denver (Libeskind) with shows.] The Guggenheim, meanwhile, will trouser an undisclosed sum for running its Gehry-designed branch on Saadiyat Island, which joins its string of existing franchises in New York, Venice, Bilbao, Berlin and - in partnership with that other international art tart, the Hermitage - Las Vegas. At 450,00 sq ft, Abu Dhabi’s will be the world’s largest Guggenheim. Wow! But what about the Tate? The argument for further expansion is the usual moan that, despite its four branches, it has too little room. Forty to fifty per cent of its holdings, goes the story, languish in store for want of space to show them. If the stores are full, you may be tempted to wonder, why the endless litany of complaints about lack of cash for acquisitions? The short answer, in the case of Tate Modern, is that its stores are full of the wrong sorts of artists. For every Picasso Weeping Woman they hold several dozen simpering sub-Pre-Raphaelite stunners which, even if you gave them all Duchampian moustaches, could never in a month of Sundays pass as modern. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, they moulder in the stores as silent witnesses to the ugly truth that behind the Tate’s ultramodern yoof-full image skulks a tricked-up, clapped-out old Victorian tart. Tate’s modern collection is limited, and the best of it is already on show. The worst, in other words, is yet to come, and an increase in floor space will hasten its onset. Hirst’s recent gift of three vitrines and a dead fly painting cannot begin to fill the hole that will be opened up by the addition of a further 6,000 sq m of exhibition space to its existing 15,000, not counting the Turbine Hall. Even if it cashes in on pledges from the other 22 leading artists who signed up three years ago to its Building the Tate Collection campaign (for some of whom the Turner Prize retrospective may have been designed as a tactful reminder) it will be short-stocked. To fill all its new space it will have to rely on loan exhibitions, which rather defeats the object of the exercise. As far as loan exhibitions go, the new extension won’t sharpen Tate Modern’s competitive edge as an international venue. What its present boxy interior conspicuously lacks is flexible open space adaptable to widely differing exhibition designs. Piano and Rogers’s Pompidou Centre may be a monstrosity, but the hangar-like expanse of its Level 6 can accommodate such radically different installations as its highly successful Dada and Giacometti shows, while unfolding a map of Paris at the tourist’s feet. Herzog & de Meuron’s extension, erupting like a cubist carbuncle from Bankside’s backside, will just add more boxes and a view of the Elephant and Castle. All this to enhance the capacity of a gallery with 5000 sq m of spare exhibition space - the Turbine Hall - which it disdains to use for exhibitions. As they say in the new European Capital of Culture, ‘you gorra laff’. In terms of value for money, the Tate project doesn’t stack up beside the Titans. The Titans will be relatively cheaper, better stocked, possibly less ugly and certainly more attractive to multi-ethnic visitors. Culture Secretary James Purnell’s generous grant of £50m towards the Tate project was prompted, he said, by youthful memories of a Damascene moment in front of the Rothko Seagram murals. Touching but nonsensical, on two counts: first, the experience was at Millbank, a stuffy unreconstructed Victorian museum; second, it was in front of the Rothkos. How many Rothkos does Purnell think there are in a generation? Artists don’t come along like TfL buses. They may not come along at all, and when a lot of them come along at once they may turn out, on close inspection, not to be artists. Galleries now operate like global corporations on the capitalist principle ‘expand or die’. Tatecorps already attracts plenty of tourists. How many more will visit to see a new growth of boxes on its behind? Or is it worried it will lose them to Abu Dhabi if it lags behind in the shape architecture stakes? If so, it’s on a hiding to nothing. This is a fool’s game for a serious gallery, because the newest novelty building will always win it. If the public doesn’t come for the art, it’s the wrong public. Architectural fashions come and go, but a collection is permanent - the Tate should spend its £50m building on that. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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