Absence of heart—as in public buildings—
Absence of mind—as in public speeches—
Absence of worth—as in goods intended for the public,

Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined
On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow,
Not a scrap is left, not even his name.

Of the late, lamented Tate Gallery in London, it can be said that only a name is left, but now clipped of its definite article and divided into dubious duplicate, Tate Modern and Tate Britain—a reminder, if we need one, that two negatives cannot be expected to produce a positive result. Yet this ill-conceived project clearly represents the spirit of the age, which in art and in life is besotted with an appetite for destroying what is good by enlarging it to a scale of extinction. It puts us on notice that in the twenty-first century we shall need no wars to devastate our monuments to the past. Our cultural bureaucrats have shown themselves to be fully capable of performing the task for us.

At the outset of these melancholy reflections on Tate Modern, I must acknowledge that I put off visiting this bizarre creation—or should I say bazaar creation?—for a longer time than was, perhaps, appropriate for a professional critic of art and its institutions. Yet I had my reasons. The publicity campaign preceding the breakup of the old Tate Gallery into two new museums—Tate Britain, which is now to be devoted to British art, and Tate Modern, which ostensibly provides London with its first museum of modern art—was not of a sort that inspired confidence in the entire enterprise. Whether we call it hype or spin or (as we used to say) false advertising, it was clearly a campaign to prepare the public for an art museum that was to be something other than a traditional art museum. What this other thing might be remained a little vague, but one somehow had the impression that the advancement of an aesthetic understanding of works of art would not be its top priority.

The announcement of the Tate’s breakup coincided, moreover, with the Blair government’s promotion of a policy called Cool Britannia, which cheerfully promised to extirpate all signs of Britishness from the U.K.’s institutions and their symbols—a campaign of self-annihilation that, in my view, is a death warrant for much that I have cherished in Britain during my frequent visits over the course of some four decades. Suddenly, the very words “British” and “English” were being stigmatized as “racist” by wacko members of the Blair government—a sure sign that “New Labour,” as the Blair government bills itself, was launching a far-reaching Kulturkampf bound to effect the art museums, which in Britain (as in most of Europe) are state institutions.

My mounting feeling of dread was further advanced when, shortly before the opening of the new Tates, I attended a lecture at our own Museum of Modern Art in New York by the mastermind of this project, Sir Nicholas Serota, who outlined his program of “new narratives” for these institutions. Sir Nicholas spoke like a man who had lately emerged from a conversion experience somewhere in the vicinity of Disneyland or some other American theme park. Themes, themes, and more themes were now to determine every aspect of the museums’ “new narratives,” while historical chronology and the presentation of art according to periods, styles, and movements were to be consigned to oblivion as outmoded, if not indeed—perish the thought—elitist.

Thus distinctions between past and present, never mind the very idea of tradition in art, were to be abandoned in favor of something like a boundless eternal present in which an anaesthetic populist ideology would trump every other intellectual imperative. Thinking back now about Sir Nicholas’s talk at MOMA that evening, it occurs to me that his only remaining attachment to tradition of any sort is to be found in his acceptance of a knighthood from Her Majesty’s government. Was this a sign of hypocrisy? Perhaps. But as it was also a sign of power, it was deemed to be acceptable. All of which I took to be a dour augury, and I was in any case fully occupied elsewhere. I was in no hurry to visit the ruins of what I had for so long regarded as a beloved embodiment of the civilization that had successfully survived the punishing wars and revolutions of the twentieth century with its democracy, its civility, and many of its cultural traditions intact.

By March, however, I felt I could no longer defer this professional obligation, and I set off for London with a heavy heart. Arriving at night, I had my first encounter with the new, dumbed-down BBC—another sign of the times—when I attempted to find a news broadcast on the television set in my hotel room. What I found was a dispiriting variety of tabloid journalism, delivered in a distinctly downmarket accent, that was determined to whip up hysteria over the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in the countryside while exploiting the already rampant cynicism over the sleaze-scandals of the Blair government. The obvious correlatives that obtained between the Blair government’s hype and the Tates’ spin strategy were ominous indeed.

Still, London looked beautiful the next morning as I set off on foot from my hotel in Knightsbridge to see “The Genius of Rome” exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Spring comes earlier to London than to New York, and the parks were already ablaze with daffodils and primroses in bloom. The sun was shining, the skies were blue, and “The Genius of Rome” show (brilliantly reviewed in our April issue by Karen Wilkin) proved to be every bit as marvelous as I had expected it to be. It was a pleasure to be able to revisit this exhibition twice again during my week in London. Marvelous, too, was the big exhibition of Rembrandt’s etchings at the British Museum.

I was less thrilled—appalled, in fact—by the new, horribly overscale entrance to the British Museum, which now encloses the museum’s legendary Reading Room in a faceless structure of monstrous height and girth. No matter how well acquainted we may be with the many examples of execrable museum architecture in our time, atrocities of this magnitude have not lost their power to shock when we first encounter them. It therefore seemed prudent to put off my initial visit to Tate Modern for another day.

That day, too, was bright with sunshine and blue skies, which made the taxi ride to Bankside, across the Thames, a very pleasant journey. Despair descended, however, immediately upon entering the vast ascending ramp, fully wide enough (it seemed) for two-way truck traffic, that serves as the principal pedestrian entrance to Tate Modern. This unwelcoming space in what was once a power station seems deliberately to embrace the featureless brutality of an underground parking garage. Until then, I had thought that the lugubrious Hayward Gallery, designed in the 1960s in what its creators were happy to call the Brutalist style, was the worst museum building in London, but that distinction now has been won by Tate Modern. It was almost enough to make one lapse into nostalgia for the kinder and gentler horrors of the Museé d’Orsay in Paris, which was originally built to serve as a major railway terminal and still feels like one.

I had only just entered this behemoth, but it was already enough to make one experience a profound sense of loss—a loss not only of beauty and amenity, but of civilization itself. This was an experience that was to be repeated many times as I began to make my way through the organized chaos of the place, for upon ascending to the top of the unlovely entrance ramp, the visitor to Tate Modern suddenly encounters a somewhat different prospect: the gloom of an underground parking garage dissolves into something resembling a gigantic airport arrivals terminal, where crowds, confusion, and commercialism reign and the only work of art to be seen is what I suppose must be called a sculpture constructed of discarded office furniture. This turned out to be one of Damien Hirst’s non-zoological inspirations, and it prompted me to wonder if this mini-monument to Neo-Dada was meant to represent some sort of farewell to The Tate Gallery of old—a memento mori, as it were. Or was it, perhaps, to be construed as a symbolic portrait of Sir Nicholas himself—a portrait of the museum director as deranged bureaucrat? When I put this question to a harried clerk at the Information counter, he was unable (or unwilling) to shed any light in the matter. Given the unrelieved din that made even a brief exchange of words something of a feat, I could hardly blame him.

Then it became a question of what to attempt to see first: the reinstallation of the Tate’s modern art collection or its mammoth inaugural theme exhibition—“Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis.” Given the museum’s chaotic layout, there was no consecutive way of seeing either without skipping floors and doubling back. For the sections of “Century City” devoted to London and Bombay were right there on the first floor, behind the Information counter, while the sections devoted to other cities in this mad mélange of what it pleased its sizable cadre of curators to call art and culture but was often neither—Paris, Rio, Vienna, Moscow, New York, and Lagos—were on the fourth floor, sandwiched in between the two floors, three and five, devoted to a reinstallation of the museum’s collection.

In the end, the order in which the visitor to Tate Modern looks at anything—whether walls festooned with words or rooms in which magazines and newspapers vie for attention with works of art—hardly matters. For every object and every wall text is manacled to its assigned themes and classified according to its subject and sub- subject. In the “Century City” show, each metropolis was also strictly confined to a specific time frame. This was lucky for Paris, which was assigned the years 1905–1915, and for Vienna, which was given 1908–1918, and so some art worth looking at was actually on the walls. The way it was presented, however, was another story—a “new narrative.”

You might think it impossible to devote even a thematic show to the art and culture in Paris in the years 1905–1915 that could reduce its high artistic achievement to a tedious, incoherent jumble. Yet Serge Fauchereau, the curator of the Paris section of “Century City,” somehow managed to pull off this unimaginable feat without a hitch. A few of Picasso’s and Braque’s finest Cubist collages, for example, were hung in a narrow corridor in which they could hardly be seen if three or four people were present at the same time. And remember, “Century City” was designed to draw huge crowds— and did. The sound track—Stravinsky, I think—didn’t help matters, either. It only added to the din.

New York, to be blunt about it, was given the shaft in “Century City.” To provide even a foreshortened glimpse of art in New York in the twentieth century, what period would commend itself? The years before and during World War I when Alfred Stieglitz was showing John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Paul Strand, et al., and publishing Camera Work? Or the period in the 1940s and 50s when the Abstract Expressionists captured the attention of artists and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and New York itself became the art capital of the Western world?

Forget it. The geniuses who organized “Century City” were clearly determined to cut New York down to size—the smallest possible size. So the New York section of the show was limited to a five-year slot, 1969–1974—compared, say, to the fifteen-year period, 1955–1970, assigned to Lagos, and the fourteen years, 1950–1964, given to Rio de Janeiro. The point, apparently, was to find a time when New York in particular and the United States as a whole could be depicted as a society on the skids.

The iconic object here was the silkscreen print of a demonic Richard Nixon which Andy Warhol produced for the George McGovern campaign in 1972. And to underscore an alleged absence of significant art in New York in this half-decade period, the curator of the New York section—Donna de Salvo—featured the work of Linda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Vito Acconci, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The creepiest thing of all, perhaps, was the first wall text which greeted visitors to the New York section of “Century City”: a quotation from that celebrated connoisseur of urban amenity, the late Nikita Khrushchev, whose statement deplored the absence of “greenery” in Manhattan. Apparently, nobody took the trouble to show him Central Park when he made his famous foray to New York to announce that the Soviets would “bury” us.

Does all this suggest that “Century City” was, in its principal focus and energy, more of an exercise in left-wing political pieties than a serious inquiry into the worldwide achievements of art and culture in the twentieth century? You bet. Hence the exuberant attention lavished upon the Moscow section of “Century City,” which focused on the years 1916–1930. Did anything even vaguely unpleasant happen to the modernist movement in Russia in this period? Well, sort of. Lutz Becker, the curator of the Moscow section of the show, does very briefly acknowledge that “Mayakovsky’s suicide and Malevich’s three-month imprisonment as a suspected spy in 1930 were for many a signal of the beginning of Stalin’s terror.” But that’s the last we hear of such unpleasantness, and even this less than satisfactory reference to the Terror that vanquished the Soviet avant-garde is quickly followed by a statement that is patently false. “Throughout the 1920s,” writes Mr. Becker, “artists had contributed to the new society voluntarily and with enthusiasm, with a minimum of Party interference.” The fact is, you either had to give up your artistic freedom in favor of Party hack work or leave the country to survive. Which is why Rodchenko, Stepanova, Lissitzky, and other true believers in the Revolution became, in their graphic art, apologists for Stalin’s Terror, and also why, by 1923, Kandinsky, Chagall, Gabo, Pevsner, and many other talents had already fled to the West.

What was finally even worse than the political slant of “Century City” was its pervasive contempt for art itself—a contempt that refused to acknowledge that works of art do not, in the character and quality of the experience they afford, differ from any other variety of material culture. As a consequence, it was only as a variety of material culture that works of art were presented to the public in this “new narrative” of social ideology.

Alas, it cannot be said that the reinstallation of the Tate’s collection of modern art fared much better. In this “new narrative,” an elaborate system of classifying objects according to themes reduces all of the art to four basic categories: “History/Memory/Society”; “Nude/Action/Body”; “Landscape/Matter/ Environment”; and “Still Life/Object/Real Life.” Except for the artists who are given the privilege of having rooms largely devoted to their work—Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois, among the Americans, and Richard Deacon and Ben Nicholson, among the Brits—the idea seems to be to pit unlike talents against each other in a game of survival-of-the-strongest. Thus a Richard Long mud wall is pitted against a water lilies painting by Claude Monet in the “Landscape/Matter/Environment” section. The most horrific of these confrontational installations is the room in the “Nude/Action/Body” section in which several really grim paintings by Lucian Freud and Christian Schad are pitted against a single exquisite work by Bonnar—The Bath (1925), the first of the many paintings Bonnard devoted to the subject of his wife lying full length in a bath tub, and a picture that was much beloved by an earlier generation of English painters. This grotesque abuse of a masterpiece ought really to be called museum rape, and it tells us everything we need to know about Sir Nicholas’s “new narratives.” In one of the installations at Tate Britain, by the way, Lucian Freud is similarly pitted against a Whistler portrait of a girl in a white dress.

Why, one is finally left wondering, this persistent, pernicious imperative to degrade art of superior subtelty and delicacy— Monet, Bonnard, et al.—by means of incongruous juxtaposition with the kinds of art that are blatantly inimical to its spirit? We can only guess at the motives governing this malign impulse, which is as pervasive in the installation of the Tate’s permanent collection of modern art as it is in so much of the art selected for the “Century City” installations. My own guess is that it may be an attempt by a younger generation of curators to reduce the masterworks of modern art to the debased levels of feeling which dominate the so-called Young British Artists—think “Sensation,” which came to the Brooklyn Museum by way of the Royal Academy and the Charles Saatchi collection. The current London art establishment has so much invested (in every sense) in the international prosperity of these YBAs that it was probably inevitable that their supporters would make an attempt to bring everything else down to their level. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense, then, that the first work which the visitor to Tate Modern encounters is that construction of discarded office furniture by Damien Hirst.

It makes the same kind of sense for the New York section of “Century City” to be dominated by some overscale urban debris—no doubt rescued from the demolition of a New York building—by Gordon Matta-Clark and by Linda Benglis’s photograph of herself in the nude sporting a sizable dildo—a picture that once served as an advertisment in Artforum. If items like these were meant to signify that New York art in the early 1970s is only of interest to London now as a kind of prelude to the Brits’ own YBAs, the point is well made. But for most of us in New York, Gordon Matta-Clark and Linda Benglis were entirely marginal to what art in New York was up to in that period. At every turn at Tate Modern, a line remembered from William Hazlitt seemed to sum up the whole spirit of the place: “People who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Is this really the way to run a museum?

The truth is, Tate Modern isn’t an art museum at all. It’s something else—a culture mall in which bits and pieces of twentieth-century art, culture, and politics are deboned and pre-packaged for quick and effortless consumption. It is the function of this culture mall to reduce the achievements of high art to the sensation levels of tabloid journalism and pop entertainment. It addresses itself not only to a pop sensibility but to a pop attention span, and with a similar need for interminable hubbub. Is it any wonder, then, that it has proved to be a tremendous success, especially appealing to the young? But this success has been purchased at what is also a tremendous price. Absence of heart, Absence of mind, Absence of worth: Tate Modern has them all.