The City of Curiosities.(Tate Modern, London, England)(Brief Article)

Bodacious Bollywood heroines pout at visitors to the Tate Modern's main hall. Fluorescent tubes dangle over a red fiberglass cow and painted shopfront shutters. Has some phantasmagoric Mumbai street scene crashed a mainstream London museum? The Tate's huge, bustling new show-- "Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis"--is a sprawling look at how the urban experience shapes culture. Looking at nine different cities, each having undergone a cultural renaissance in the last century, 12 curators have put together what amounts to a love letter to the modern city.

Century City is the brand-new Tate Modern's first major loan show and its first homage to world culture. "In the past, we might have done a show on Paris, London, Vienna and Moscow," says curator Jane Burton. "This was a very conscious decision to try to bring in other cities and other artistic cultures." The art may come from places as diverse as Lagos, Rio and New York, but the overall tone is optimistic, vibrant and alive. The sprawling, eclectic exhibit is like a stroll through a global city made up of Lenin's Moscow, Freud's Vienna, Picasso's Paris. The overall effect is what Burton calls "a cabinet of curiosities."

Several of the nine cities flowered as cosmopolitan crossroads. The Paris of 1905 to 1915 is the blueprint for the modernist mixing of cultures and media, as a portrait of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera by Italian Amedeo Modigliani shows. The Mumbai of the Hindu-Muslim riots of the early 1990s shows the twisted underside of cosmopolitanism: sectarian strife. In his sculpture "Memorial," Vivan Sundaram ...