When modern art is fun at Tate

By Julian Sudre


THE ART of taking in the visual aspect of abstract pieces of work is not the attraction du jour anymore. Tate Modern is embracing wall-to wall exhilaration in every sense of the term.

And why using only the faculty of seeing when you can absorb physically the heart-pumping sensation that is thrown into the bargain? For the next six months an experimental [art] is putatively helping people who suffer from depression.

The installation of the Test Site by the German artist Carsten Holler who came up with the idea of designing five fully-enclosed steel and plastic tubes which incontrovertibly are more fun than art, will provide London a parallel as unprecedented as the Eye in Waterloo.

Modern art has become alive and accessible to everyone and Tate Modern’s patter wants us to get on to it and scream for more.

Of course, such infantile approach to the business world creates a fantastic publicity, easily digested by the hoi polloi and consequently will enhance Tate’s profit margin.

To that end, one could infer that a bastion for modern art -- is swallowing the populace and will spit it out into more artistic, if yet reflective tableaux of cognitive human behaviour.

Unfortunately, the emperor of British contemporary art is slicing the apple in half. The first half – the Stakhavonite of modern arts – will always enjoy the diversity of the Tate and remain a stalwart for post-modernism. They, for good measure, are accepting revisionism as a form of creativity and evolution in the mores of a society.
The other half – the Luddites of intellectual advancement – refute incontestably the expansion of modernism in the abstract sense of the word. The enjoyment is purely first-hand and is as air-headed as inhaling helium.

The London eye was not playing for keeps; the structure was temporary. But the idea of blending uniqueness (be it magnificent or grotesque) with stomach-churning vistas was, undoubtedly, a grand stratagem to elicit publicity. It has worked so well that it has overshadowed Tower Bridge as the quintessence of a London postcard – near enough.

Tate is not, well hopefully, taking on an NHS style – good or bad – so as reduce queues or augment them but Holler said that sliding like skiing can help people from depression. So why has Disneyland not advertised itself as a cure for depressive folks yet?

At least Tate seems to distinguish between the virtues of art and therapies, never mind its advertising; but when a funfair is getting incorporated into Tate, it will be high time we drew the line between docile amusement and cerebral activities.