Burlington's editorial ripples outwards
May 1 2012
The Burlington Magazine's stinging critique of Tate Britain, which I mentioned yesterday, has been picked up by the wider press. Here is The Telegraph, The Times (paywall), and Jonathan Jones in The Guardian agrees with it wholeheartedly:
Tate is the custodian of a national collection of British art since 1500, whether it wants to be or not. The unique breadth of the Tate collection of British art makes it a fundamental historical resource. History is popular: the Tate has tons of art illuminating themes such as the English Civil War and those gorgeous Georgians, which are constantly being explored in TV dramas and documentaries. Why does it assume no one is interested when there is so much evidence to the contrary?
Even if no one cared about the world of Joseph Wright of Derby, the Tate would still have a duty to show his art properly. A museum cannot just shrug off its responsibility to the public collection it holds. Or can it? Tate has apparently established the right to treat its collection not as our national property, to be on view for us to see and draw conclusions about, so much as the plaything of curators who can trawl it to create mediocre exhibitions such as the recent Migrations.
Update - a Tate spokesman states in the gallery's defence that:
"At the moment, just over fifty percent of the works on display from the Collection at Tate Britain are pre-1900".
But as a reader writes:
'Interesting that they apparently think that the fact that only almost half of what's up is 20thC gets them off the hook. When you've got a mandate to cover five centuries of art, it's a slightly odd defence.'
