Tate Tanks
July 16 2012
Picture: Metro
Much excitement in the press about the new 'Tank' galleries (or rather, as we must call such things these days, 'spaces') at Tate Modern. Worth a read also is Bryan Appleyard's interview in The Sunday Times with Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate's director. It contains two interesting nuggets - first, in a discussion on the supremacy of modern art over Old Masters we learn that Serota would have a Titian above all else;
Warhol has become an old master: you can pick up a good Titian for about a fifth of the price of a decent Warhol. “I know which you’d have,” he [Serota] says. “The Titian. So would I. I’d take The Flaying of Marsyas ahead of almost anything; whether I could live with it would be another question.”
And second, Brian Sewell delivers a dose of sound sense on the hang at Tate Britain (for which Serota is ultimately responsible for):
“I don’t object to him having all that power,” says the art critic Brian Sewell. “Well, of course, I do, but I’m not going to make a big thing out of that. The real source of my anger is that he has, in my view, destroyed Tate Britain, which has ceased to be a museum of ancestral British art. It is impossible now to take students there and demonstrate the history of British art.”
