{"id":1276,"date":"2012-07-14T00:37:11","date_gmt":"2012-07-14T00:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=1276"},"modified":"2012-07-14T00:49:53","modified_gmt":"2012-07-14T00:49:53","slug":"lunch-with-the-ft-nicholas-serota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=1276","title":{"rendered":"Lunch with the FT: Nicholas Serota"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peguei l\u00e1 no site do FT<\/a> essa mat\u00e9ria do Jackie Wullschlager<\/p>\n

Jackie Wullschlager enjoys a t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with Tate\u2019s director, the force behind the world\u2019s most popular modern art museum<\/strong><\/div>\n
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\"Nicholas<\/div>\n
\u00a9James Ferguson<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe boat made an unscheduled stop,\u201d apologises a windswept Nicholas Serota, as he takes a seat opposite me at a corner table in Tate Modern\u2019s seventh-floor restaurant. Below me, the Tate-to-Tate catamaran, decorated with Damien Hirst spots, pulls away. It runs between Tate Modern and Tate Britain, where Serota \u2013 director of both, plus Tate outposts at Liverpool and St Ives \u2013 has his office.<\/div>\n
Serota, who is tall and very thin, with craggy animated features, piercing eyes and an austere, functional look \u2013 black suit, white shirt, rimless glasses \u2013 is, in fact, on time for lunch: his watch is always set 10 minutes fast. He glances appreciatively around the loud, packed restaurant, its walls daubed with more spots \u2013 these being the cheerful red-and-white motifs of Japanese artist\u00a0Yayoi Kusama<\/a>, whose Tate exhibition recently closed \u2013 and orders a plate of olives and bread, and a jug of tap water.<\/div>\n
\u201cAt the beginning\u201d, he says, \u201cthere was debate about whether this place would be for the St John\u2019s Wood and Notting Hill crowd to spend lots of money, or somewhere good quality but accessible for all. That\u2019s what we went for: better a destination gallery with a good caf\u00e9 attached than the other way round.\u201d<\/div>\n
Destination gallery is an understatement: Serota, 66, heads the world\u2019s most visited, most influential modern art museum, which, since its launch in 2000, has transformed the presentation and understanding of contemporary art around the globe. Next week he pushes these boundaries further with the\u00a0inauguration of the Tanks<\/a>: these 30-metre wide concrete oil tanks, dating from the building\u2019s days as a power station, will become the first museum galleries anywhere dedicated to film, installation and performance pieces. Their completion represents the initial stage of a \u00a3215m Tate Modern expansion, due to finish in 2016.<\/div>\n
\u201cYou can tell a lot about what society thought of contemporary art over the past hundred years from Tate\u2019s sites,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Millbank site was a former prison, Liverpool\u2019s Albert Dock [site] a derelict warehouse, St Ives a gas works bombed by the Luftwaffe. We always go where no one else wants to go. We\u2019ve given this building a life; it had been empty since 1981. In 1993, a trustee against the Tate Modern plan asked me, \u2018How will people even get there?\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
Nibbling olives but ignoring the bread, Serota says the former power station always offered possibilities for expansion. \u201cBut we forbade the architects from looking at the tanks in the early stages because they were too attractive. We wouldn\u2019t have known how to use them.\u201d<\/div>\n
Nor was it envisaged that Tate Modern\u2019s popularity \u2013 annual attendances of 5m far outstrip the 2m predicted \u2013 would drive expansion so quickly, or that art-making would shift so dramatically towards installation and performative work, demanding new exhibition spaces. \u201cAudiences seek different forms of participation and engagement,\u201d Serota says. \u201cThere\u2019s an appetite for the immersive experience, both physical and phenomenological like James Turrell, or emotional like Bill Viola.\u201d<\/div>\n
But, I say, no one really likes video. \u201cWe are all sick of biennales where it takes 20 minutes to see every work,\u201d Serota admits. \u201cBut if it\u2019s shown properly, it works. The Tanks give us the opportunity to respond to the changing practice of artists.\u201d<\/div>\n
. . .<\/strong><\/div>\n
The waiter arrives. At artists\u2019 receptions, I have observed that Serota is a sparse eater, so I vow to follow his lead rather than appear greedy. But he courteously insists that I choose first. We both pick light starters \u2013 squash tart for me, asparagus for him \u2013 which arrive quickly and are consumed without comment.<\/div>\n
\u201cOnly recently have I begun to understand what it felt like to be Picasso and Braque in 1907 \u2013 absolutely determined to bury the previous century,\u201d Serota continues. \u201cThe initial years of this millennium seemed much like the final years of the last but by 2008-09 the 1990s felt so far behind. Of course, lots of artists who emerged [then] continue to make good work, like Peter Doig, but the real energy has gone into photography, film, new media.\u201d<\/div>\n
The challenge for a museum of Tate\u2019s stature is to move rapidly enough to identify and acquire new works of lasting importance while disdaining passing fashions. Yet time is art\u2019s only real judge. Does this responsibility keep him awake at night?<\/div>\n
\u201cNot much keeps me awake but I do worry about buying things, especially if I\u2019ve missed things,\u201d he replies. \u201cBuying for Tate is a huge privilege. All we can do is put down first markers, a frame we know will be modified by history, as artists who come later either do or don\u2019t respond to things we\u2019ve collected.<\/div>\n
\u201cI would love to have bought Damien [Hirst]\u2019s fly piece \u2018A Thousand Years\u2019 but Saatchi got there just ahead of us. The other piece I saw at the time was [Rachel Whiteread\u2019s] \u2018Ghost\u2019, which Saatchi had already bought. It\u2019s a difficult thing for an institution to do. You say, \u2018This is an artist, 27 years old, who\u2019s made this piece out of plaster \u2013 conservators say will cost a lot to look after, should we buy it?\u2019 The answer is, \u2018Yes, we should have.\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
Our main courses arrive: a simple paprika-dusted fillet of plaice with lemon-roasted new potatoes and a pepper ragout for me, and for Serota a towering concoction of bream poised on a stack of mussels, in turn wedged on a bed of tarragon-infused tomatoes, the whole topped with a heap of crispy samphire. He surveys this wryly \u2013 as if it were a metaphor for the balancing act of his job \u2013 and stabs instead at the accompanying broccoli spears.<\/div>\n
Serota is modest to the point of self-erasure about his role in establishing Tate Modern: \u201cThat London needed a museum of modern art was not an especially original idea \u2013 Peggy Guggenheim tried to set one up here in 1938,\u201d he says. But as the grandson of a Russian-Jewish cabinet maker and the son of Stanley, a civil engineer, and Beatrice, a politician who was Harold Wilson\u2019s minister of health, he is a born builder, democrat and leader, and his power is the most controversial thing about Tate.<\/div>\n
With a grasp of tiny detail and the bigger picture alike, he controls every aspect of his museums. Although staff universally praise \u201cNick\u201d as accessible and efficient, one joked that he even chooses the crisps on sale in the caf\u00e9. Several effective curators who share his vision are long-termers, but he has not been so successful at holding on to his immediate deputies: Tate Modern had three directors \u2013 Lars Nittve, Vicente Todoli, and now Chris Dercon \u2013 in its first decade. The Bankside museum in particular \u2013 classless yet commanding, playful yet serious, restrained yet intellectually broad-ranging \u2013 has been identified as \u201cthe house that Nick built\u201d.<\/div>\n
Those values were formed by public service at home and at school \u2013 Serota was head boy and games captain at Haberdashers\u2019 Aske\u2019s boys\u2019 school in north London. His parents were shocked when he switched from reading economics to art history at Cambridge \u2013 he was \u201cundoubtedly in love with Piero della Francesca\u201d \u2013 but his first job was in the public sector at the Arts Council. At 27 he became director of Modern Art Oxford, moving to head the Whitechapel Gallery by the time he was 30.<\/div>\n
He overhauled both and mounted exhibitions of international artists then little-known or liked in Britain: Joseph Beuys, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse \u2013 all pioneers of conceptualism. And, though his own taste is broad-ranging, Serota has been strongly identified with that movement. Tate Modern, through Turbine Hall commissions such as Olafur Eliasson\u2019s \u201cWeather Project\u201d, not only shows but encourages the making of accessible conceptual art on a sensational scale.<\/div>\n
So effective is his vision that when you visit Bankside it is hard to conceive of a modern art museum being any other way. Yet I wonder whether large numbers of people can be enticed by such opening Tanks projects as Eddie Peake\u2019s film exploring sexuality and voyeurism, or \u201cDress Vehicles\u201d, Haegue Yang\u2019s invitation to participate in performative sculptures.<\/div>\n
As Serota unpicks the installation on his plate, I venture that Tate has sacrificed old-fashioned art connoisseurship for theory-driven interpretations. Like many critics, I howled at his hang of Tate Modern\u2019s permanent collection along non-chronological lines when the museum was inaugurated in 2000: Matisse nudged against Marlene Dumas, works by the same artists were separated across different floors, there was no sense of historical epochs or landmark moments. \u201cChronology is not a tool of art-historical interpretation which can be used at one moment, discarded the next,\u201d wrote the eminent critic David Sylvester in the London Review of Books; \u201cit\u2019s an objective reality, built into the fabric of the work.\u201d Despite the protests, a thematic emphasis has been maintained in subsequent reorganisations, based around subjects such as \u201cPoetry and Dream\u201d or \u201cEnergy and Process\u201d.<\/div>\n
\u201cTate aspires to show an argument, put beautifully,\u201d Serota responds. \u201cYou can\u2019t just show art from 1900 to 2000 \u2013 you have to be more adventurous, use the strengths of the collection. Tate\u2019s collection is not as strong in early 20th-century works as Moma or Paris \u2013 it didn\u2019t seem worthwhile doing a minor version of that. What was worthwhile was putting art now alongside that work.\u201d<\/div>\n
Is this smart diplomacy \u2013 making a virtue out of a weakness \u2013 or, even more cleverly, using perceived inadequacy to postmodern, anarchic effect? However, as I have argued, Tate\u2019s collection is not that weak, and the number of its early masterpieces not on display at all strikes me as scandalous: Cezanne\u2019s proto-cubist \u201cThe Grounds of the Ch\u00e2teau Noir\u201d (1900-06) and portrait \u201cThe Gardener Vallier\u201d (1906); Bonnard\u2019s shimmering \u201cThe Table\u201d (1925, given to Tate in 1926). Tate has seven works by Chagall and none is on show; nor are any of its six excellent Modiglianis. Yet these are more significant, affecting works than much of what is exhibited at Bankside \u2013 Lamia Joreige\u2019s worthy video interviews (2006) about the Lebanese civil war, or Grenville Davey\u2019s dim circular sculpture \u201cCe&Ce\u201d (1989), to pick just a couple of examples.<\/div>\n
\u201cThe problem with a chronological survey is that early rooms feel strong and familiar, later ones very temporary,\u201d says Serota. \u201cPart of our purpose was to make new favourites from art of the past 20 years. Now, when we don\u2019t have on view Cornelia Parker\u2019s \u201cCold Dark Matter\u201d or Rebecca Horn\u2019s hanging piano \u201cConcert for Anarchy\u201d, we get as many complaints as when we have a second-tier Matisse in storage. But no, we don\u2019t take down \u2018The Snail\u2019.\u201d<\/div>\n
. . .<\/strong><\/div>\n
According to Serota, in an age of mass travel and online information, museums no longer need to \u201cconstruct textbook histories on the wall\u201d, though landmark exhibitions remain important: \u201cWith a show like Matisse Picasso you capture a new audience and build authority and trust\u201d. He continues: \u201cFrom 1890 to the 1970s, public libraries were very important, giving opportunities. People across all classes used them, helping social cohesion. Now museums are taking on that role.\u201d<\/div>\n
I finish my plaice; Serota is still crunching through his samphire. \u201cThis will keep me going through meetings,\u201d he says. I ask if many such meetings are about fundraising. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t do what we do at Tate without private money. The danger for me is I inevitably spend a lot of time in certain company and, if I\u2019m not careful, I can forget that there\u2019s another whole side of society that has more stake in Tate than those I\u2019m trying to get money from. People need to find things here that they would never find in other places. You won\u2019t get some kid from Southwark going off to Savile Row to see Louise Bourgeois but they will come to see her here.\u201d<\/div>\n
The waiter removes our plates; Serota orders a camomile tea. I say it is ironic that, as it shapes British public culture, his generation \u2013 which includes Neil MacGregor at the British Museum and Nicholas Penny at the National Gallery \u2013 are products of the egalitarian 1960s, yet are exercising authority just as the art world is challenged by dealers and collectors flaunting vast wealth.<\/div>\n
\u201cNeil and I are products of a certain moment, a postwar, slightly utopian view of society which embraced the welfare state but did not rule out entrepreneurship. I sometimes think that the world of money is a bit younger than us.\u201d Serota lives in King\u2019s Cross with his second wife, Teresa Gleadowe. On his walls are prints by Hogarth and Richard Hamilton, but \u201cnothing of any real value\u201d. He does not collect, and would have to declare personal purchases to Tate. \u201cOccasionally, I see something but it would give a very odd signal if I buy it and the artist isn\u2019t represented by Tate.\u201d<\/div>\n
He loves going to visit artists \u2013 \u201cTheir insights into the world are one of the things that make life worth living\u201d \u2013 and his deep engagement with their work is evident in brilliant recent shows he curated: retrospectives of\u00a0Gerhard Richter<\/a>, Cy Twombly, Howard Hodgkin. Curating is \u201cthe best thing I do! But I can\u2019t make too many shows. We have many talented people.\u201d<\/div>\n
He has no fixed retirement date: appointed in 1988 for a seven-year term, his contract was renewed in 1995 and 2002, before, in 2008, he was made a \u201cpermanent employee\u201d \u2013 unprecedented at Tate. But as he drains his tea I cannot resist raising the question of his successor. He hopes it will happen \u201cquite soon\u201d. \u201cWhen my daughter was five, I suppose I hadn\u2019t been at home as much as I should have been, and she asked whether I would die at the Whitechapel. There is a plaque at the Whitechapel to artists killed in action. Maybe I will be killed in action here! But I shouldn\u2019t outstay my welcome. Everything needs renewal. I don\u2019t expect to be carried feet-first out of the Tate.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Jackie Wullschlager is the FT\u2019s visual arts critic<\/em><\/div>\n
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Restaurant at Tate Modern<\/strong><\/div>\n
Bankside, London SE1<\/div>\n
Squash and Stinking Bishop tart\u00a0\u00a36.95<\/strong><\/div>\n
Asparagus, toasted cashews, orange citronette, black pepper mascarpone\u00a0\u00a37.25<\/strong><\/div>\n
Fish of the day, fresh from Newlyn boats: plaice fillet, lemon-roasted new potatoes and pepper ragout\u00a0\u00a314.95<\/strong><\/div>\n
Pan-fried sea bream, cockles and mussels, tomato and tarragon sauce with crispy samphire\u00a0\u00a316.25<\/strong><\/div>\n
Broccoli spears\u00a0\u00a33.50<\/strong><\/div>\n
Camomile tea\u00a0\u00a32.20<\/strong><\/div>\n
Service charge\u00a0\u00a36.38<\/strong><\/div>\n
Total (including service) \u00a357.48<\/strong><\/div>\n

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Copyright<\/a>\u00a0The Financial Times Limited 2012.<\/p>\n