Back to the main Tate WebsiteHomeSupportersContact UsShop Online

My Skin and The Du Cane and Boehm Faimily Group. After Gawen Hamilton 1734-2000

Tate Modern is Britain's new national museum of modern art. As class compositions change, each new economic force takes over the mantle of British taste. Each succeeding social elite must have its art, its brand around which secret codes and systems of value can be exchanged. This is usually in the form of what is to be tolerated and what is not, what's in and what's out, who's in and who's out. New money needs to be part of history. With money you can buy your way into art history. With even more money you can shape the future of that history.

From Henry Tate's convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harcourt, to help out with funds, to Charles Saatchi's position as a patron and the Saatchi brothers' hand in the 1979 Thatcherite assent; to the hacking out of an industrial age monument reinvented with new money, displaying to all the City of London how good it has been, how rich it has become, how powerful it is... To inhabit the carcass of dead industries is a powerful metaphor: not to sweep it away but to borrow into it, occupy it, show power over the generation of power itself.

There will also be a full range of special exhibitions and a broad public corporate programme of events throughout the year.


Bankside Power Station has been transformed into Tate Modern by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The former Turbine Hall, running the whole length of the vast building, now marks a breathtaking entrance to the gallery. From here visitors will be swept up by escalator through two floors featuring a café, shop and auditorium to three levels of galleries. At the top of the building is a new two storey glass structure which not only provides natural light into the galleries on the top floors, but will also house a stunning café offering outstanding views across London.

Tate Modern is supported by:

          


Tate 2000 launch
in association with


Supported by