IF YOU were an invading alien looking for an iconic site to stage the end of humanity, where would you go? In the 1953 film
The Quatermass Experiment, Westminster Abbey was the choice for the showdown between Professor Quatermass and the invading mutant. In this year’s remake the producers opted for the great turbine hall of Tate Modern, a remarkable choice given that five years ago even seasoned taxi drivers couldn’t get you there without looking it up.
The success of Tate Modern is all credit to its creator, Sir Nicholas Serota. As the man in charge of this and all other Tates (Britain, on the north side of the Thames, Liverpool and St Ives) he has forged a cultural institution that extends far beyond the bricks of the Bankside building. Tate Modern has become not only a great international museum but a democratic venue where people can just hang out and enjoy the view, without any intellectual obligations. As Serota says: “I don’t understand all modern art. And if I don’t, why should anyone else feel they have to?”
Serota became director of the Tate in 1988; before that, he was at the Whitechapel, before that at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. For a man steeped in art academia, he has a remarkable grasp of the real world, and it is this that has helped to make his tenure such a success.
But unlike his perceived nemesis Charles Saatchi, Serota is not turned on by being in the spotlight. If anything, the opposite is true — or that, at least, is the impression he gives. The man pouring my cup of tea in the Tate offices is polite, reserved, faintly intimidating. He is not, as some have suggested, humourless. But he is, nevertheless, a Very Serious Person.
Then again, I suppose it takes someone as serious about art as Serota to pull off something as big as Tate Modern. Back in May 2000 all the talk was of the opening-night party, which famously was (or wasn’t) attended by Madonna (or was it Kylie?). Typically, although he vaguely recalls the fuss (there have been a few, including that on the opening night Rodin’s The Kiss was placed next to the toilets), his abiding memory is of a lesser celebrity: the Icelandic singer Björk. “That was where she and Matthew Barney met. Now they live together and have two kids,” he says delightedly, as if the matchmaking of two artistic talents were in some way a metaphor for his work.
This role as cultural alchemist is one that Serota seems (almost) comfortable with. “It isn’t me, I just don’t believe that. The Tate brand is strong because there are some very good programmes being made.
“All I have to do is encourage people to be their best. Sometimes I macro and sometimes I micro — I concentrate for a bit here, and for a month or two I’m working on one project, then I move on to another.”
But there’s more to it than simply managing the talent. It’s also about sticking up for modern art and artists, and finding a way of communicating their vision to the public. To an extent, Tate Modern was a response to a cultural need. “It would have been very difficult for us to have done it in the late Eighties,” says Serota. “The YBAs [Young British Artists] emerged in the early Nineties, and public awareness of them began in the mid-Nineties with Rachel Whiteread’s House and Damien Hirst winning the Turner Prize in 1995. Then came Sensations at the Royal Academy in 1997, and Tate Modern came after all of that. If you like, everyone was really ready for it. Now it’s an accepted part of the landscape.
“Now people are more interested in identifying with the art that is being made today rather than the art that was made 100 years ago. And there is still excitement, even if they don’t think the YBAs are . . .” he pauses, “boiling at this moment.”
With hindsight, everyone was really ready for changes in 1997. A fresh-faced Tony Blair hitched a ride on the YBA bandwagon along with the best of them, and Serota himself was knighted just two years later. Nevertheless, he retains an impartial outlook. “The commitment to funding Tate Modern was actually made by John Major with his creation of the National Lottery and by Virginia Bottomley, as Secretary of State for National Heritage as it then was, saying yes to revenue funding.
“This Government has done a great deal in terms of extending access through free admission . . . yet curiously, there is still a sense that at Cabinet level it hasn’t embraced the arts; that where it has given money, it’s not really proud to have done it.
“To some extent that is surprising, because art affects everyone’s lives. It’s not just a little elite that is concerned with the arts.”
Tate Modern’s astonishing figures bear this out. Serota has proved beyond doubt that even so-called difficult art can pull in the punters if you do it right: to date more than 21 million visitors have passed through its doors, and last year 60 per cent of visitors to Tate Modern were under 35.
A large part of Serota’s preoccupation is preserving and enlarging Tate Modern’s permanent collection. In this endeavour he is, inevitably, hamstrung by cash problems. “We ought to be in a position to buy great art. Instead we have just enough money to buy art that was made last year.”
Too much art gets away. For example, he bemoans the fact that Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost was sold to the National Gallery in Washington. But what matters most is maximising what the gallery already has.
“Vicente the director of Tate Modern and his team are working on a new installation of the collection that will move away from the present themes,” he says.
“We are also thinking about how to complete Tate Modern. We originally bought the building because it would allow us to expand if required. There’s another huge space, on the south side of the turbine, which we can take over in 2008/09. It will give us a chance to do more things that we couldn’t do first time round, such as performance, and to show more photography, film and, occasionally, architecture. And we need more learning space to create a Tate Institute.”
And what about him? He has serious international standing, and there are other roles elsewhere, with more financial muscle. Might he be tempted? “Of course, eventually I will go, but I still have plenty to do. As long as I can make a contribution, I will.”
WHO GOES THERE?
1. Total number of visitors to date: 21,752,664.
2. Most popular visiting hour: Saturday between 2pm and 3pm, when an average of 2,391 people visit the gallery. The busiest hour last year was between those hours on July 10, when 5,581 people passed through its doors.
3. Some 53 per cent of visitors are male, 47 per cent female.
4. Tate Modern is officially the most popular museum of modern art in the world and the third most popular free attraction in London.
5. The average visiting time is 1 hour 43 minutes.
