Tate Modern Is the Museum of the Century (Like It or Not)

When the Museum of Modern Art debuted in a Manhattan townhouse in 1929, it faced incomprehension from audiences still uncomfortable with abstract art. When the Centre Georges Pompidou inaugurated its inside-out home in Paris in 1977, philosophers denounced the multidisciplinary museum as a shopping center. But something else happened with Tate Modern, bigger than either of them, when it opened in London in 2000: immediate success.

In a country with an above-average suspicion of modernism, in a city that had never had a full-scale museum of modern and contemporary art, Tate Modern arrived on a bank of the River Thames at just the right time. The European Union was six years old and easyJet was five. Tony Blair was in his first term as prime minister. A newly confident, outward-facing London decided it needed a place to marvel.

This week, Tate Modern turns 25. Its success was, from the beginning, not just a British but an international story. (Four of its five directors have been foreigners.) Its legacy extends far past the South Bank, into the deep structure of the art industry, where it transformed, for better and worse, audience expectations at museums worldwide.

It taught curators to propound a global view of art — or perhaps no view at all. Its influence ripples through the rethought MoMA — but also the selfie stations of the Museum of Ice Cream. When it opened, it seemed to have a confident, if imperfect, answer to the question of what an art museum was supposed to be in the 21st century. Now visitor numbers are 20 percent down since before the pandemic, and funding crises have led to multiple rounds of layoffs. I’m not sure how confident it is today.

The story begins upriver, at the neoclassical Tate Gallery in the Pimlico district, where a new director named Nicholas Serota arrived in 1988. The museum had grown cramped, thanks to a weird double focus: It was the home of the national collection of British art from the 16th century to the present day, including a giant bequest of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings and watercolors, but also a shabby collection of so-called “modern foreign art,” which largely reflected old British tastes for life study and landscape.

Serota’s solution was to divide the baby. The Tate Gallery’s old headquarters would be for the art of the United Kingdom (and renamed Tate Britain), while the international holdings would get a new home. The Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron won a design competition to transform the Bankside Power Station, a gargantuan nullity on the south (read: wrong) side of the Thames.

Still relatively untested, Herzog & de Meuron proposed a masterful program of adaptive reuse. Downstairs, they introduced a long, sloping entrance. Upstairs, they converted the boiler house into suites of galleries, with naughtily unvarnished wood floors whose scuffs and scratches would give Tate Modern a frisson of its industrial past. The design was practical, but the symbolism was unsubtle: Right across the river from St. Paul’s Cathedral, an old cathedral of industry was becoming a temple to art.

The V.I.P.’s at the opening on May 11, 2000, craned to see Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman,” a 30-foot-tall bronze of a fearsome spider with a sac of marble eggs, which had replaced the oil-fired turbines in the power plant’s central expanse. The public streamed in a day later, and visitor numbers were twice as large as Tate management had predicted. (Admission was free from Day 1, a year before Gordon Brown, Blair’s chancellor of the Exchequer, would make free museums a national policy.) Yet British museums have always been object-rich and cash-poor, and running a maximalist museum with a minimal acquisitions budget was, as they say locally, a sticky wicket.

Serota and his team came up with several bypasses — solutions that would make Tate Modern, for a time, the country’s top tourist attraction, but would also cast some of the past core functions of museums into doubt.

The first bypass, hotly debated in 2000, was to disguise the collection’s bald spots by hanging the art in four thematically organized, century-hopping presentations, rather than as a single chronological march. Tate Modern mewed mightily that this comb-over constituted a “radical break” with museum tradition — and, implicitly, with MoMA — for a new millennium.

In places, the anachronism did produce some exciting friction: Matisse’s four relief bronzes of women’s backs, borrowing from the massing and stylization of African sculpture, hung alongside six ornery watercolors of nude women by the contemporary South African painter Marlene Dumas. But it didn’t produce much insight, and more often the juxtapositions felt simplistic, superficial. Monet’s “Water Lilies” hung behind chunks of slate gathered by the British sculptor Richard Long: two artists who liked to go outside.

A second, better bypass was to look past modernism in Western Europe and the United States, and, like the traders in the glass skyscrapers sprouting across the river, to seek outsize value in “emerging markets.” Tate Modern announced its global ambitions in 2001 with “Century City,” its first major loan exhibition, which remapped the story of 20th-century art as a decade-by-decade grand tour, stopping in Paris, Moscow and New York, but also Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos and — the terminal station — ’90s London.

If the Tate could not afford Cubist painting or postwar American abstraction (those, at the start of the millennium, were being bought up by the Qataris) it could make a virtue of the non-Western painting and sculpture that its rivals had ignored, craftily acquired through circles of trustees who had connections both to London and to Latin America, Eastern Europe, or South Asia. (Britain’s famously loose tax system for “non-domiciled” foreigners, which made London pre-2016 into the clubhouse of the global and sometimes shady superrich, was always one of Tate Modern’s secret powers — one the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer eliminated in 2025.)

But Tate Modern’s biggest bypass — biggest in several senses — took place in its Turbine Hall, where the initial success of Bourgeois’s spider spurred an annual commission of a giant new artwork, usually accompanied by a media campaign and reliable congestion.

The most influential of these was Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project,” from 2003, which confected a full-scale indoor sunset out of a mirrored ceiling, fog machines and a shining semicircular screen. I saw it back then, and remember the crepuscular haze of the Turbine Hall, how the false sun overhead reduced my visible spectrum to yellow and shades of gray. I remember the crowds too. Visitors started vegging out on Herzog & de Meuron’s floor, leaving the London gray for a concrete beach. The BBC weather service came to broadcast to the nation the next day’s forecast (tomorrow at Tate Modern: sunny).

“When Tate Modern opened in 2000, contemporary art was a minority sport,” Maria Balshaw observed years before succeeding Serota to oversee the Tate museums. “The Turbine Hall changed that forever.” She is absolutely right — though I’d add that the Turbine Hall commissions, and Eliasson’s man-made sun above all, did not just enlarge art’s public but probably shrank its horizons, too. While the sun was shining, Tate Modern was mounting ambitious retrospectives upstairs of the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Donald Judd. But if the history of art felt imposing, no need to strain yourself. In the Turbine Hall, art could be as enjoyable, and as undemanding, as lying back on your chaise in Marbella.

Soon enough, in the Turbine Hall, there would be funfair slides by Carsten Höller, bunk beds from Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, dance parties, beat boxing lessons, a hair salon and a mass sleepover. Way back in the 2000s, when the adjective “social” still signified doing things in public, these large-scale interactive works suggested a new style of art that proposed real-life encounters in the gallery could have some larger aesthetic import. By 2017, when some Danes used their Turbine Hall commission to install a “playfully subversive” swing set, the joke was really on us.

This was certainly not the first museum to junk the hushed autonomy of the white cube for the allures of tourism, commerce, events and multimedia. In the 1980s, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard walked into the Pompidou and diagnosed that a supposed art museum for the masses was actually a “space of transparency” that turned spectators into shoppers. In the 1990s, after opening Guggenheim Bilbao, its director, Thomas Krens, defined the contemporary museum as “a theme park” whose collection was only one of its “attractions,” coequal with spectacular architecture and outposts for eating and shopping.

Yet it was Tate Modern that ratified and globalized the transformation of our museums from storehouses of artworks and narrators of history to pavilions for consumption and celebration. It was not only art but art experiences that Tate Modern now offered — and soon, in London and then worldwide, it would become clear which museumgoers preferred. “Despite the many excellent exhibitions staged over the years, I don’t believe that they are the key to what happened,” Lars Nittve, Tate Modern’s first director, conceded (or appreciated) in 2016. As they say at Shakespeare’s Globe a few doors down, there’s the rub.

To meet growing public appetites, Tate Modern opened two additional spaces. The Tanks, former oil storage units converted into galleries for performance and film, was readied in time for the 2012 London Olympics; a more dubious brick extension (also designed by Herzog & de Meuron) debuted a week before the Brexit referendum of 2016. That year functions as a convenient mile marker of when Tate, like many other things in this country, began to lose its international credibility, though it’s hardly so simple; the Serpentine has fared just fine since then, while smaller venues such as Chisenhale Gallery got a new lease on life.

Tate’s real struggle over the last 10 years has been whether a museum whose finances required year-on-year audience growth, a museum whose art amusements had been addressed to a single and undifferentiated “public,” could keep its balance as politics and digital technologies pushed us into ever more fragmented segments.

The identitarian debates that shook American museums in the late 2010s took place here, too, in a more elementary register. Tate Modern post-Brexit embraced familiar mantles of environmental justice, racial reckoning and community uplift, the last seen especially when the museum renamed half its facility after a youth leader from a nearby neighborhood center. (In an almost too perfect materialization of its contradictory poses, the other half is named after a Ukraine-sanctioned billionaire oligarch.) There were, of course, important exhibitions, including the multifaceted survey of Black American art called “Soul of a Nation” and the landmark year-in-the-life show “Picasso 1932,” but the museum has, more frequently, assigned to art the smaller goal of TikTok-depth advocacy: Migration is bittersweet, gender is a spectrum, climate change is real, exit through the gift shop.

On my most recent visit, the collection galleries looked worse than I have ever seen them, a shapeless and joyless miscellany that stank of resignation and self-doubt. There were paintings by the once-neglected global talents I first encountered here years ago — Ibrahim El-Salahi of Sudan, Saloua Raouda Choucair of Lebanon — but no attempt at all to connect them to any larger history. You carom through its galleries like in a pinball machine: ping, some Brazilian abstraction; clink-clank, some war paintings from Spain 20 years earlier; ka-ching, some contemporary photography. Poor Matisse has ended up in a gallery devoted to … colors. (Do you have a favorite color, or are you no longer in kindergarten?)

The Turbine Hall commission is still going on, although, like the Turner Prize organized by Tate Britain, it endures mostly thanks to Blair-era nostalgia. Only a few Turbine Hall installations have been widely celebrated or even debated in 15 years, though perhaps you are holding out hope for this year’s commission, from an artist from Norway’s far north “preserving Sámi ancestral knowledge and values to protect the environment for future generations.”

Whether Tate’s curators got it right or wrong in 2000, they still imagined that viewers cared about art as art, as elements of an art history to be broadened, disrupted, remixed. Now the very idea of a history of art, especially modern art, seems futile, fusty, meritless — superseded by an evangelical commitment to impact, change and relevance. Even in the Turbine Hall, where art history seemed to have passed into spectacle, every artist must now “respond” to some external political or social stimulus like the tiny triangular hammer they hit your knee with at the doctor’s office.

When I was getting started as a critic, Tate Modern was the museum I knew best. (The place was a reliable first-date spot in my early 20s, with its free admission and late openings on the weekend.) I looked to the hulking museum on the South Bank as a leading voice in the era of globalization. I thought the reason we wanted to diversify our museums was to narrate a truer story of culture to a fuller variety of spectators. What I couldn’t foresee was how the shift to spectacle in the Turbine Hall — the shift to accessibility and immediacy that Tate Modern made its early signature — would prefigure, and justify, the shift to evangelism in culture at large.

When art lost its attachment to time, when life changed from a linear progression to an algorithmic suckhole, our museums changed, too. Once storehouses of modern history, they became just another venue in an attention economy. Once they schooled us in aesthetic discernment; now display is advocacy and bigger is better. But what does the modern in Tate Modern mean, anyway? It is a descriptor from a century 25 years in the rearview mirror now, and to the young people visiting for the first time, modernism seems as useless as any rusting turbine.