Shrinking audiences, a cash crisis and rivals on the rise: what’s gone wrong at Tate?

1 day ago

When a national institution starts to sound like Spın̈al Tap, you know it’s in trouble,Recently, Tate channelled the mythic rock band’s claim that its audience was not shrinking, just “becoming more selective”,In response to a decline in visitor numbers and a cash crisis leading to redundancies, the museum group emphasised “record numbers of young visitors” to Tate Modern (who cares about all those uncool visitors above the age of 35?),Yet in the summer, Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, blamed the group’s problems on a dearth of 16-24-year-old visitors from continental Europe,So they appeal to youth, but the wrong youth?This week, Tate Modern will open a blockbuster show that may attract paying adults.

But Theatre Picasso draws almost entirely on the museum’s own collection of his works, which should be on permanent view in its free displays anyway, though for some time they have not,It is a far cry from past exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse, Gauguin, Rauschenberg, and in 2022 Cézanne, boasting superb loans from museums all over the world,Why has Tate seemed to become so … small?Meanwhile, its rival, the National Gallery, is expanding,The National announced this week that it had accumulated the funds to build an entire new wing, and would drop its policy of collecting only pre-1900 art, reversing an agreement that only ever helped Tate,The gallery is openly poaching Tate’s territory after its Van Gogh exhibition established it as a world-class venue for modern art.

This comes hot on the heels of a ravishing rehang this year from Cimabue to – yes – Picasso.It is going modern, and it even has a new Locatelli bar that seems to have floated in from Rome’s Termini station.The National Gallery and Tate’s approaches to modern art are very different.Tate Modern has always put the contemporary to the fore, refusing to emphasise early 20th-century “masters”.But the National can show how art was revolutionised between 1870 and 1920 against the deep history of the art it houses.

It is perfectly placed to tell the tale Tate Modern does not, of how Cézanne inspired Picasso and Braque, how cubism sparked futurism and suprematism.But if it is to collect more modern art, it must stay serious.No purpose would be served by randomly showing a Jeff Koons or two.We don’t need a fifth Tate on Trafalgar Square.Meanwhile, Tate Liverpool is closed for rebuilding and when I recently visited its temporary home, it felt like a deserted husk complete with grumpy caretaker.

The only Tate where I can honestly say I had a good time lately was St Ives, and that was mostly for the views of the beach.Tate and the National both suffered in the Covid years but it is the older institution that has come out fighting.Sign up to Art WeeklyYour weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitionsafter newsletter promotionTate Britain currently stands not for a broad-based idea of British art, but one uninterested in most pre-1800 artists (despite owning the best collection of historical British art in the world), rejecting the 1990s Young British Artist generation and avoiding big British art stars, past and present.Jenny Saville, for example, has just had a fabulous retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, another venue outflanking Tate.Tate seems to be a classic case of an institution that hit on a winning formula some years ago and is trapped by the rules it set itself, stuck in routines that are no longer new.

Turbine Hall commissions are still timed to the Frieze Art Fair, even though Frieze is nothing like the event it once was.And it still insists on a definition of the modern that mostly means video, film, performance, installation despite the fact that art now is more eclectic, shifting easily from such media to painting, drawing and sculpture.Tracey Emin’s Tate Modern retrospective next year is a good sign, though, giving star treatment to an artist who has led the way back to painting.Perhaps this is the real reason the National Gallery has the wind in its sails: we are not so sure what is avant garde or conservative any more, and the new, these days, is as likely to happen on canvas as on screen.There may be some catch-up in the shortlisting of the painter Mohammed Sami for this year’s Turner Prize, run by Tate Britain though staged this year in Bradford.

Yet Tate needs more than a couple of moves in the right direction.It needs to break out of its rigid brand.The overwrought hang at Tate Britain, which has been widely and rightly criticised for its didactic wall texts and glib historical grandstanding, will have to be ditched at some point and replaced with rooms celebrating, rather than judging, 500 years of national artistic achievement.As for Tate Modern, it should tell the story of how modernism was born and evolved from fauvism to abstract expressionism with some sense of history, some reverence for greatness.Or if not, now is the time to consider giving its Picassos and Rothkos to the National Gallery.

technologySee all

Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study

Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as “coke”, “weed” and “molly”

3 days ago

Skip Apple’s new iPhone – five tips to make your old phone feel new again

On Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone 17 series with the usual spate of new features, including a thinner design, improved displays and a camera with 4x optical zoom. If you’ve been getting frustrated with your old phone, or just tired of it, the lithe new model may look exactly like the device you need to launch your budding photographic career, reconnect with long-lost friends and maybe even save your life in an emergency.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more

3 days ago

How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg review – spinning Silicon Valley

Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it

3 days ago

Apple debuts thinner, $999 iPhone Air at ‘awe-dropping’ annual product event

Apple debuted its latest iPhone on Tuesday, trumpeting the smartphone’s slimmest design yet. The device, named the iPhone Air, is one of several upgrades the company unveiled at its annual product showcase, promoted with the title “awe-dropping”. The event kicked off at 10am PT with the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, speaking in front of its Cupertino headquarters.“Design is at the core of everything we do,” Cook said. The CEO touted the company’s thin iPhone, which sports a width of 5

4 days ago

How Google dodged a major breakup – and why OpenAI is to thank for it

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I finish the audiobook version of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I can’t say I found compelling.In tech – artificial intelligence is having its day in court with an 11th-hour appearance in Google’s landmark antitrust trial and Anthropic’s major settlement with book authors.Google dodged a catastrophic breakup, and it has its biggest competitor to thank for that, according to the judge who could have forced the tech giant to sell off Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, and perhaps Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.Amit Mehta, who ruled in 2024 that Google had built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the internet search business, said last week that he would not force the most drastic remedy on the tech giant

4 days ago

The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’

Experts are concerned about people emotionally depending on AI, but these women say their digital companions are misunderstoodThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.A young tattoo artist on a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains cozies up by the campfire, as her boyfriend Solin describes the constellations twinkling above them: the spidery limbs of Hercules, the blue-white sheen of Vega.The Guardian’s journalism is independent

4 days ago

sportSee all