Jack Wakefield

The Heckler: Tate Britain is a mess. Its director Penelope Curtis must go

There’s a serious scholarship deficiency now at the gallery, as the abysmal current Sculpture Victorious exhibitions shows, and the blame for this lies with Curtis - and Nicholas Serota

Things have not been happy at Tate Britain for some time. Last year Waldemar Januszczak wrote an article culminating with this cri de coeur: ‘Curtis has to go. She really does.’ The meat of the argument against Tate Britain’s director was that she had presided over a run of misconceived exhibitions disliked as much by critics and scholars as by the public. In her defence, these were not the blockbuster shows but the low-cost fillers that UK museums must put on when the coffers are low. As such they tend to be long on ideas and short on jaw-dropping loans. It is not much of a defence. The massive unseen collections of the Tate present plenty of opportunity to mount extraordinary exhibitions.

Now, however, she has presided over a stinker of a blockbuster. Sculpture Victorious has been panned across the board.  The Guardian’s good art critic, Adrian Searle, labelled it ‘an epic fail’ and Richard Dorment, who is not only the Telegraph’s chief art critic but also an eminent scholar of Victorian sculpture, wrote the worst review I have ever read. He takes issue with the conception — ‘an extended academic lecture …deadly dull from start to finish’; the curation — ‘these dolts don’t realise …that exhibitions … are above all visual experiences’; and the scholarship — ‘hot-air generalisations that veer between the banal …and the meaningless’.

This is unacceptable where Tate Britain is playing on home ground. Worse, Penelope Curtis is a sculpture expert, previously leading the Henry Moore Institute. She has just finished giving the Paul Mellon lectures on ‘Sculpture on the Threshold’. I made it to the second of her five lectures, in which she took an hour to express the relatively simple idea that tomb sculpture had an influence on 20th-century sculptors.

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