What's On

Tate Britain | Tate Modern | Tate Liverpool | Tate St Ives

The Tate, with its changing programme of displays and events at all four Tate galleries, has two contradictory aspirations. It has to maintain itself as an elite temple of the arts, reflecting the historical descendant of the social values of that elite. Then there is the Tate as a tool for democratic education: of the cultural values that orientate the trajectory of the British at home, and in an international cultured context. This web-project perhaps takes another position, somewhere in the broken links of the collection - situated as if within the virtual representation of the Tate site - but not spoiling the hallowed turf itself.

To explore the economic and social elite's use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power we need to trace at least two threads of present history. The first involves mapping the rituals of tastefulness, the distance it creates from the uninspired mob, the language and manners of the tasteful, and the inherent hypocrisy that this implies. The second centres on the histories of peoples - ascendant, static or uncounted - which recognise themselves in terms of this tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly.
 

Here are some of the displays and exhibitions not on at each gallery:
 

Tate Modern Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying -Typhoon coming on and Mervin's Ear. After Turner 1840-2000

Tate Liverpool Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhon coming on and Mud from the Thames. After Turner 1840-2000

Tate St Ives Council flat after British Modernism. 1979-2000