The museum as culture mall.

Absence of heart--as in public buildings--Absence of mind--as in public speeches--Absence of worth--as in goods intended for the public,

Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow, Not a scrap is left, not even his name.

--W. H. Auden, in "The Chimeras"

Of the late, lamented Tate Gallery in London, it can be said that only a name is left, but now clipped of its definite article and divided into dubious duplicate, Tate Modern and Tate Britain--a reminder, if we need one, that two negatives cannot be expected to produce a positive result. Yet this ill-conceived project clearly represents the spirit of the age, which in art and in life is besotted with an appetite for destroying what is good by enlarging it to a scale of extinction. It puts us on notice that in the twenty-first century we shall need no wars to devastate our monuments to the past. Our cultural bureaucrats have shown themselves to be fully capable of performing the task for us.

At the outset of these melancholy reflections on Tate Modern, I must acknowledge that I put off visiting this bizarre creation--or should I say bazaar creation?--for a longer time than was, perhaps, appropriate for a professional critic of art and its institutions. Yet I had my reasons. The publicity campaign preceding the breakup of the old Tate Gallery into two new museums--Tate Britain, which is now to be devoted to British art, and Tate Modern, which ostensibly provides London with its first museum of modern art--was not of a sort that inspired confidence in the entire enterprise. Whether we call it hype or spin or (as we used to say) false advertising, it was clearly a campaign to prepare the public for an art museum that was to be something other than a traditional art museum. What this other thing might be remained a little vague, but one somehow had the impression that the advancement of an aesthetic understanding of works of art would not be its top priority.

The announcement of the Tate's breakup coincided, moreover, with the Blair government's promotion of a policy called Cool Britannia, which cheerfully promised to extirpate all signs of Britishness from the U.K.'s institutions and their symbols--a campaign of self-annihilation that, in my view, is a death warrant for much that I have cherished in Britain during my frequent visits over the course of some four decades. Suddenly, the very words "British" and "English" were being stigmatized as "racist" by wacko members of the Blair government--a sure sign that "New Labour" as the Blair government bills itself, was launching a far-reaching Kulturkampf bound to effect the art museums, which in Britain (as in most of Europe) are state institutions.

My mounting feeling of dread was further advanced when, shortly before the opening of the new Tates, I attended a lecture at our own Museum of Modern Art in New York by the mastermind of this project, Sir Nicholas Serota, who outlined his program of "new narratives" for these institutions. Sir Nicholas spoke like a man who had lately emerged from a conversion experience somewhere in the vicinity of Disneyland or some other American theme park. Themes, themes, and more themes were now to determine every aspect of the museums' "new narratives" while historical chronology and the presentation of art according to periods, styles, and movements were to be consigned to oblivion as outmoded, if not indeed--perish the thought--elitist.