Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It opened its doors one minute early and in that instant, defying formality, a step ahead, warmly welcoming, the world’s most popular modern art museum announced its aims. At 9.59am on May 12 2000, the first crowds poured down the shiny concrete slope to the Turbine Hall to be greeted by a giant bronze spider. A quarter century later, the sweeping entrance to Tate Modern still gives visitors a thrill of anticipation. There is much to celebrate, though also causes for lament.The biggest pleasure of Tate Modern’s 25th birthday festivities is that the original occupant of that vast gallery, Louise Bourgeois’s disquieting/protective arachnid “Maman”, returns. As Tate owns it, it should stay forever, icon for a museum that surprisingly doesn’t have one as MoMA has “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, or the National Gallery “The Ambassadors”.But Tate Modern showed from the start that it was about more than collections of objects. The Turbine Hall’s early installations especially — Olafur Eliasson’s mirror-sun “The Weather Project”, Carsten Höller’s slides — helped turn the museum into something unprecedented: an open, free, unintimidating civic space where people gathered, danced, laughed, cried, picnicked, slid, lay on the floor. We became performers ourselves in these joyous spectacles, as immersive as they were awe-striking.Visitor numbers quickly soared to nearly 6mn, and just as people enlivened the building, so the museum transformed London, bringing regeneration, global clout, confidence and money.Tate Modern’s anti-painting bias is part of a narrow curatorial ideology privileging content and messaging over the ambiguities, emotional depth and nuanced questioning stirred by great artTate Modern remains the best embodiment of the capital’s economic transition from the 20th to 21st century. Bankside’s electricity generating station which once fuelled the city is now its cultural powerhouse, attracting audiences, artists, expensive foreign dealers (Gagosian, Hauser, Zwirner, Ropac) and lavish international donors. Last month Argentine-American real estate mogul Jorge M Pérez donated “Iva” by Joan Mitchell, a key abstract expressionist until now unrepresented here. Her lush mauve-blue triptych looks stunning opposite Mark Rothko’s “Seagram” murals.Museums commemorate history, but Tate Modern looks forward. Its anniversary display is “A Year in Art: 2050”, juxtaposing failed Utopias with imagined future dystopias. Umberto Boccioni’s aerodynamic figure hurtling towards progress “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, and El Lissitzky’s rarely seen, fragile, abstracted personages — “New Man”, “Gravediggers” — designed as lithographs for the futurist opera Victory over the Sun, meet Ayoung Kim’s lurid video animation “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” (2022), a dance algorithm controlling a gig-economy worker.Next weekend’s birthday festival includes futuristic performances in diverse guises: Lawrence Lek’s video games about sentient AI “NOX”, live tarot readings in Meschac Gaba’s “Museum of Contemporary African Art”.The late curator Achim Borchardt-Hume thought Tate Modern a living entity, a cross between “a covered street and a public park”, from the subterranean Tanks to the top floor viewing platform, the building marvellously inviting fresh interaction with familiar works. Just relocated for the birthday weekend, Giacometti is glorious in the raw gloom of the Tanks: we wander around “Man Pointing” casting long shadows, and come face to face with the caged wood and steel forms of “Hour of the Traces” poignantly alone in the steel-lined “Drum” gallery, still reeking of oil. The setting returns the sculptures to the rough urban context of their creation.Lars Nittve, Tate Modern’s inaugural director, believes that “the architecture, and how it felt to enter the space . . . not the strength of the Tate collection” determined its popularity. That seems right: I know no Londoner over the age of five who hasn’t visited and enjoyed Tate Modern, but few have opinions on the permanent collection, partly because its non-chronological, bafflingly arranged thematic hang — Degas’ “Little Dancer” in “Media Networks”! — confuses even regular visitors.This matters, because long term a beloved collection — for example Centre Pompidou’s Matisses, Mirós, Mondrians — is a museum’s lifeblood. So it is significant that instead of a blockbuster birthday exhibition, Tate Modern’s anniversary showcase is a 25-work trail (re)discovering the collection.It features six pivotal pieces: Duchamp’s “Fountain”, Dali’s “Lobster Telephone”, Matisse’s “The Snail”, Rothko’s “Seagrams”, Dorothea Tanning’s dream scene “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, Warhol’s newly conserved, gleaming “Marilyn Diptych”. Everything else was acquired, and much of it made, in the last 25 years. It gives fascinating and alarming insight into Tate’s current values.Masterpieces include Ibrahim El-Salahi’s “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I” (1961-5), mask-headed calligraphic figures fusing African imagery, Arab ornamentation and modernist references, and Cildo Meireles’ “Babel” (2001), an eerie blue-lit tower composed of hundreds of blaring radios, recasting the biblical story of failed communication as an allegory of sonic overload.But there are also idiocies, the most asinine “A Tax Haven Run by Women” (2010-11), Monster Chetwynd’s soft-play props sprawling around a goofy fabric “Catbus”, considering “the similarity between cults and tax havens”.Michael Wellen, senior curator of international art, explains the choices as “popular requests” plus “things across geographies”, reflecting the policy of “acquisitions according to regional specialisms feeding into a global collection, and redressing the gender balance by collecting women artists”. This confirms trends across all the Tates of putting social activism before aesthetics, geography before history, netting a global trawl of risibly dull local pieties, justified to audiences in entirely sociopolitical terms. On the trail, Outi Pieski’s multicoloured hanging threads, “Spell On You” (2020), handwoven with women duojárs, “is a nomadic monument inspired by the gathering of Sámi people” which “raises important questions around ancestral return”. Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel’s rotting vegetables on rocks “The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge” (2021) is about “creating space for Indigenous knowledges to be acknowledged and respected”. Ming Wong’s interminable film “Life of Imitation” (2009) explores “intersections of race and sexuality through drag and impersonation” in Singapore.It is not to deny that minority rights matter to deplore this overemphasis in a modern art museum that makes no room for a single de Kooning or Brancusi — just two of many major white European male painters and sculptors represented in the collection but no longer exhibited.Before the pandemic, MoMA curator Stuart Comer dared joke to a Tate Modern colleague: “I inquired if Tate was still trying to reclaim the Empire through its global mission”. That scenario is happening — as farce rather than tragedy. It is doubly patronising: Tate Modern looks increasingly like a museum of anthropology, even ethnography — precisely the colonial attitudes it critiques — yet visitors feel hectored (and bored) by guilt-trip language, for example the “post-colonial hangover” explaining Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs of life in the United Arab Emirates, also on the trail. Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo says “I want us to take real risks”, but forthcoming solo shows for Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Tracey Emin and Ana Mendieta continue the run of indigenous or politically engaged female artists that is now Tate’s predictable terrain. True risk would be exhibiting a significant but under-the-radar historic male artist, comparable to 2024-25’s shows of Hans Josephsohn in Paris, Medardo Rosso in Basel, or Chaim Soutine in Milan.Tate’s 21st century collection, too, is varied, terrific — and invisible. It owns, but currently does not display, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film-clip timepiece “The Clock” (2010), the century’s most original work so far, plus important paintings of beauty and trauma speaking for our times: Luc Tuyman’s cinematic “The Shore” (2014), distant figures gesturing from a dark maroon ground; Adrian Ghenie’s gestural war canvas “Black Flag” (2015); Kerry James Marshall’s epic “Untitled (London Bridge)” (2017); Cy Twombly’s “Untitled (Bacchus)” (2008). Tate Modern’s anti-painting bias — apart from Lubaina Himid, primarily an activist-conceptualist, no living painter has had a solo show here since 2015 — is part of a narrow curatorial ideology privileging content and messaging over the ambiguities, emotional depth and nuanced questioning stirred by great art. The approach diminishes the permanent display — even Picasso’s seminal “Three Dancers”, “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair” and “Weeping Woman” aren’t on the walls. If this is the price for Tate Modern forging a youthful, rebellious identity, let’s hope maturity brings balance. Paying exhibition figures suggest audiences mostly love painting: the majority of its dozen best-attended shows were devoted to painters, as were all the others reaching 300,000 visitors (Rothko, Lichtenstein, Klee). But Kusama’s immersive “Mirror Room” tops the list, and though it’s not a level field — her exhibition ran three years instead of a show’s usual few months — that is remarkable, as is Eliasson’s position at number three.Before 2000, large-scale, participatory, experiential exhibitions such as Eliasson’s In Real Life were almost unknown in museums. Tate Modern changed how we experience art, staging both memorable traditional and innovative exhibitions, from Picasso and Matisse to Eliasson’s “Weather Project”. When the BBC broadcast the weather forecast from that show, ending “and here at the Tate the sun is still shining”, Tate Modern seemed to bathe the nation in an optimistic glow.Today clouds loom: budget deficit, staff cuts, audiences down from 6.1mn in 2019 to 4.6mn in 2024, probably due to rising living costs and declining tourism. But the first 25 years have established foundations: mesmerising architecture, weighty collection, eager visitors. If its curators remember that they lead an art museum lucky enough to inhabit a sensational building, rather than a destination building which happens to have some art, the next quarter century beams bright.‘A Year in Art: 2050’ opens May 5. ‘Tate Modern Turns 25’, May 9-12Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
