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From: jj
Category: Exhibitions, Other stuff
Date: 08 March 2001
Good: It is a large building intended to house art. It is a popular tourist attraction. It is by the Thames. The permament collection is free to see. There is an art bookshop there. Bad: All the art is crammed into boring smallish galleries which you trail around following the flow of stupid people listening to their headsets aimlessly glancing at the feeble patronisingly didactic and crassly thematic displays of mediocre art and labels. The exhibition space looks like an afterthought designed to keep people moving. Basically half the interior volume of the TM has been left spectacularly empty while the art has to go where there is room ( more important are the cafes and bookshop and temporary exhibition spaces which they can make some money from). Conclusion: A depressingly philistine example of a corporate approach to the museum. Draw the crowds with some fancy architecture, fill up the galleries with some examples of art, doesn't matter what as long as it's signed, sit back and watch millions of people leave in their Tate Modern t-shirt as ignorant as they came, congratulate yourself on having popularised difficult modern art.
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