== Tate Modern: A sweetner for the City
http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/charle.jpg
====== John Singleton Copely 1783-1815 The Death of Major Peirson and RPD's Ears 1800-2000
A major new gallery showing tasty babes, luxury goods, own goals and psychological props collected by the British social elite, housed in the former Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames.
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 caf�, 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 caf� offering outstanding views across London.
The Tate receives support from the British Government and relies on the patronage of plcs, of foundations, and of rich and poor individuals to fund the full range of its activities. Support may be given towards scholarship, conservation, education or exhibitions. In its early years, the elite's bull-baiting pit was occupied by Tate, the ascendant 'sugar boiler', and by the static old boys of the Royal Academy of Arts. Whilst the determined bulldog grip of the Academy was strong, it eventually proved too slow to bite for the modern economic bull terrier's ascendancy to acceptance. Eventually distancing itself from The National Gallery, this rebellion by the new economic elite was content initially to appropriate the culture of the established social hierarchy, buying its art, its culture and its history. Subsequent generations took it upon themselves to invent their own.
Emerging social elites seem to find it necessary to justify their 'natural' right to wealth and privilege. This is done in many ways. The one that interests us here is the use of aesthetics to negotiate the social positions of new economic forces. Henry Tate himself directly convinced Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to help with funds to build the Tate in order to circumvent the established aesthetic orthodoxy of the time. From its beginning, the Tate has supported the taste values of whichever social elite was contemporarily emerging.
http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/scab.jpg
====== Turner, Scab and Thames Mould : 1840-2000
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