Transcript

My name is Paul Leonard and I’m Head of Sponsorship at BT; I’d like to talk to you today a little bit about our relationship with Tate which finds its expression in Tate Online. BT has been the exclusive sponsor and technical power behind Tate Online since August 2001and there have been many initiatives that we’ve put together since we started in 2001, this latest one is to present Nicholas Serota, the Director of Tate, who’s here to introduce the Donald Judd exhibition... Nicholas is a passionate enthusiast for Donald Judd and he also curated the show. Nothing can ever replace the experience of seeing art for real but showcasing art from the comfort of your own home in an online format does have certain advantages. If you cannot physically get here of course this is one perfect way to see the show itself but not just seeing the Donald Judd show but seeing virtually all of the Tate Collection, there are some 65,000 pieces of art now in an online format available to the whole of the world to see possibly for the first time ever and the whole of the world does come to this site, since we started with them in 2001 visitors to the site and traffic to the site has nearly tripled, something like a third of a million people every month come and visit Tate Online to see what’s available here and what shows are taking place or just to study the art that’s on the site itself. There are many things that we’ve done together which are truly creative; we developed a facility called iMap. iMap allows site impaired people the opportunity to appreciate art, possibly for the first time in their lives.

If you are a school teacher then Tate Online allows you the possibility of planning a visit to Tate more carefully, more thematically, it enables you to do some pre-event work and some to do some post-event follow-up.

It’s a relationship we are really really proud of and it’s won a lot of praise from people within the industry and outside of it. We’ve just won our second Interactive Bafta award for the best Online Factual website in the UK and we’ve won a clutch of other awards for the work that we do jointly with Tate in promoting the site. It’s a fantastic facility and we hope you enjoy visiting the site itself and we hope you’ll come back time and time again but more importantly we hope you’ll come to the Donald Judd show here at Tate Modern before it closes.