TATE BRITAIN – AT HALF TERM – YOU NEED MORE THAN A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR
I’m a traditionalist at heart, which is one way of saying only a generation separated from a dinosaur. Having loved the Tate for many years, I was distraught when it was given its new title, and its companion art gallery on the South Bank termed Tate Modern. Personally I think the modern era probably ended sometime in the 1970s, and we are now in the later ‘proto-barbarian’ era.
So if you read no further, just read this: never visit Tate Britain at half term.
In its efforts to increase ‘footfall’ and to therefore justify its existence, the Tate is being revamped, and the rooms subdivided into ‘a walk around the 20th century’ and ‘the historical collection’. In the middle of the historical collection room, the entire floor had been given over to children – from the tiny tot stage to the pre-teens, all earnestly constructing items from cardboard bricks. Narrowly avoiding the pudgy hands of some four year old putto from Clapham, I managed to squeeze a look at Richard Dadd’s ‘Fairy feller’s master stroke’, which I never miss, and one or two other wonderful pieces of Victoriana, but eventually gave up when I couldn’t step back enough to see properly ‘A hopeless dawn’, which like so many other works, now seems to have been crammed in with everything else. So I gave up. ‘A hopeless Saturday afternoon’ might have summed up my visit. I was curious though as to why there were so many cameras filming the scene. A difficult to see disclaimer in the main entrance area warned people that one might be filmed during one’s visit. Was it a last posthumously arranged event by the late Jimmy Savile?
