As Tate Modern in London celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, the artist Michael Craig-Martin recalls how the UK’s “cathedral to contemporary art” was born.
“Who could have imagined we would find an immense derelict site on the Thames, directly across from St Paul’s, which was seen as blighted and comparatively inexpensive?” he says, referencing Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside power station, which closed in 1981.
Tate Modern, which opened on 11 May 2000, changed how London’s art landscape was perceived, putting it firmly on the international map. The new museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, kickstarted the contemporary and Modern art scene, heralding the Frieze London art fair, which launched in 2003, and a wave of incoming international commercial galleries.
Before its opening, “Modern art was treated as art’s poor cousin, barely deserving serious consideration,” says Craig-Martin, who served as an artist trustee for two terms during the 1990s. “The director of Tate from 1989, Nicholas Serota, was determined to change this situation, and as trustees we sought to support him in the realisation of his impossibly ambitious vision,” he adds.
The first set of free-admission collection displays were organised thematically and across different periods, which at the time was regarded as a curatorial innovation. The launch exhibition, Century City, focused on nine cities from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro, and was widely panned at the time. “The project was insanely overambitious and bound to be a disappointment,” wrote The Wall Street Journal.
“It was a global show, a manifesto exhibition, and a kind of Trojan horse project because it unleashed much of what followed,” says Frances Morris, a former director of Tate Modern. “If we could bring together these geographically disparate conversations in an exhibition, how could we build these histories into the permanent collection?”
Tate Modern also set out early on to build a truly global collection. Some critics have argued that the thematic, more global approach was adopted because Tate’s collection was full of holes, lacking key works.
Morris delares: “Nonsense. We wanted to make a museum for the 21st century, responding to the UK’s increasingly diverse population, with roots in so many different cultural contexts. We actually opened up the glaring holes in the art historical canon, including the almost complete absence of women, for example, or artists of colour. We wanted to show that art history could be much bigger, richer and more complex than the story that Tate had told before.”
This global reach is reflected in the Tate’s numerous acquisition committees, for regions including Asia Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa. Tate Modern has made tapping into the assets and expertise of patrons noticeably easier, and the Tate’s annual reports make clear how successful the museum has been in building up a vast network of benefactors who sit on its numerous acquisition boards.
“We built networks of like-minded philanthropists in different parts of the globe, united by their desire to see the art of that region become better represented in the UK national collection, and whose generous contributions could be used to acquire incredible works,” says Gregor Muir, the director of collection at the Tate.
The needle has shifted in other ways, especially the growth of a younger demographic via initiatives such as Tate Collective, launched seven years ago for the 16-25 age bracket. The collective has gone from 2,000 members to becoming the “largest arts youth membership scheme in the world”, according to the Tate’s annual review 2023/24, with more than 180,000 members attracted by the £5 tickets and shop and café discounts.
New audiences
A long-standing annual artist commission partnership between the Tate and Hyundai has filled the Turbine Hall with works credited with drawing new audiences, offering a new type of museum experience which is less formal and more interactive. The Turbine Hall, which no longer garners the mass media coverage of the past, has also been a revelation for participating artists.
“You have to pay to visit the exhibitions upstairs, but the Turbine Hall is for everyone,” says Olafur Eliasson, who unveiled his mirror-and-mist experience, The weather project, in 2003. “This carries the potential of allowing people to do what they want inside the museum, to make the space their own.”
Morris argues that the perception of Tate Modern has changed over the years. “Tate Modern opened with a strong identity in 2000 but 25 years on it is quite a different institution now—more open, porous, interactive.”
When the museum opened in 2000, about 17% of all the artists in the collection were women. Asked if the figure has risen, a Tate spokesperson says that 36% of the artists on display at Tate Modern are women, “and that figure has remained pretty much constant since 2016”. This statistic may disappoint some, but female artists have dominated exhibition programming, from the popular Yoko Ono exhibition in 2024 to the vast Tracey Emin retrospective planned for 2026.
Meanwhile the Blavatnik building, formerly the £260m Switch House extension that opened in 2016, feels “strangely underused”, says one UK curator who declined to be identified by name. “The exhibition and events programming has been innovative until recently, especially in the Tanks [performance] spaces, but it could all be bolder.”
For artists, the 2022 closure of Tate Exchange—Tate Modern’s community programme, based in the Blavatnik building—was a blow. “Tate Exchange was a brave space for expanding the authorship of cultural production at a speed unknown to the art world,” says the artist Clare Twomey, who turned the space into a ceramic factory installation in 2017.
Where next? The backdrop is bleak, with the Tate slashing 7% of its workforce following a “real-terms decline” in public funds and falling visitor numbers. In 2024, Tate Modern recorded 4.6 million visitors, 3% down on the previous year.
But Karin Hindsbo, Tate Modern’s director, has said there will be a stronger focus on Indigenous artistic practices. She has told The Art Newspaper, “we will continue to strengthen transnational histories”, and wants to “take real risks”.
Morris hopes for a brave vision. “The next quarter century presents a very a different journey and needs a new route map,” she says. ”At Tate Modern we used to refer to our experimental displays as a ‘laboratory’, testing out ourselves, artists and our audiences. Wouldn’t it be exciting to feel that we had, in Tate Modern, a laboratory that was challenging itself, and the arts, and that was asking—and answering—the difficult questions?”
No Comment! Be the first one.