ICYMI: Tate Britain is forcing gallery visitors to confront history and social issues. Could it be turning people off? 

Nuance and balance are important:

…Apart from the bureaucratic mindset, it is the lack of nuance that most exasperates critics. Waldemar Januszczak, the influential art writer, complained in The Sunday Times recently of the Tate’s “growing obsession with identity politics and the dour exhibition-making that results from it,” which he wrote was partially to blame for a decline in visitors. “People don’t go to art galleries to be lectured or turned into better citizens. They go to be transported,” he added.

Art critics panned Tate Britain’s 2023 rehanging of its permanent collection – a major undertaking for a gallery of its stature – for losing a sense of wonder in art. Jonathan Jones of the left-leaning Guardian newspaper said that “today’s Tate Britain is where art goes to sleep. That’s largely because it is committed to a worthy view of art.”

Several commentators took issue with the large text introductions on the wall of each room and the labels next to paintings in the 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century rooms of the collection. They typically contain three to four paragraphs of social history with repeated mentions of the slave trade, the great wealth of the landed classes who profited from empire and then a line or two about where the artists in the room fitted in. Commentary about style and craft is noticeable by its absence.

Artists working 300 to 400 years ago are often held to the standards of today. At Tate Britain, masters such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and George Stubbs are chided for painting “flattering portraits, scenes of contented workers, and idyllic landscapes,” when in fact “British society, both here and across an expanding empire, is far from cohesive or peaceful.”

“My advice,” said Roger Turner, a private tour guide leading a party of six from a suburban London church around the permanent collection recently, “is not to look at the labels. These information boards are essentially propaganda. They prevent people from looking at the paintings and appreciating them.”

Tate Britain suffers its own particular discomfort over the slave trade, which is addressed on its website and in written displays at the gallery. 

Originally called the Tate Gallery, it was founded by a legacy from Henry Tate, who made his fortune as a sugar refiner whose company later merged into the global giant Tate & Lyle. As the gallery notes, Mr. Tate may have begun his business a couple of decades after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, but his industry was rooted in slavery. …

Source: Tate Britain is forcing gallery visitors to confront history and social issues. Could it be turning people off?