Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the
Tate, habitually inscrutable and
seemingly impervious when it comes
to criticism of his conduct, has
taken the rare, if not
unprecedented, step of striking
back, and, although he could easily
command column inches in the
national press, has chosen to do so
in Varsity, student
newspaper for Cambridge University,
the alma mater where his interest
veered from economics to art back in
the swinging 1960s.
He takes exception to my comment,
printed in 2005 in The Observer,
that “Serota, as the director,
chooses the trustees, and the
trustees are then responsible for
reappointing the director. The
director then buys the trustees’
work … Basically the Tate are
appointing their own bosses.” He
says definitively, “I don’t have any
part to play in their appointment.”
In that case I would like to know
why The Board of Trustees of the
Tate Gallery Annual Accounts
2007-2008 (”ordered by the
House of Commons to be printed”)
says in the section on trustees:
“The key stages of the appointment
are overseen by a panel, which will
normally include the Director”.
It would also be interesting to
hear how he explains the September
2005 Tate board minutes, which
state: “The Director reported that
two strong candidates were to be
interviewed for the position of
Artist Trustee by a panel comprising
himself, Paul Myners and the
Independent Assessor, Jan Hall.”
More recently, in the May 2007
minutes, another trustee interview
is recorded as having a panel of
three trustees, the independent
assessor and Serota “in an advisory
capacity”. (Presumably his advice
was that his advice should be
ignored in order for him not to play
any part.) I assume he would not
suggest that Tate Chairman, Paul
Myners – or Lord Myners as we should
now call him – has signed off
incorrect statements in the minutes
about such matters.
Stuckist Turner Prize
demonstration, 29 September 2008.
Video stills: Rick Friend.
Serota’s brazen denial of the
facts brings to mind the application
he made in 2004 to the Art Fund for
a grant towards the purchase of Tate
trustee Chris Ofili’s work The Upper
Room, when he signed a statement
that the Tate had made no commitment
to the work (a condition of the
grant), whereas in fact eight months
previously the Tate had paid an
instalment of £250,000 towards it.
Serota’s explanation was that he had
had “a failing in his head”. He
seems prone to a recurrent state of
rose-tinted self-delusion, which he
believes we will all share, if he
communicates it sincerely enough.
This would explain why he attempts
to refute my analysis of his
relationship with the trustees by
asking wide-eyed, “Why would I want
to win their support?”
The answer seems stupefyingly
obvious to me. He would want to win
their support, because they are his
employer. As a result of his having
won their support, he was appointed
in 1988 for a seven year term, which
was renewed in 1995 and 2002, and
then this year determined by them to
be a permanent post because of
changes in employment law – an
interpretation questioned on both
legal and ethical grounds by lawyer
and Stuckist artist, Leo Goatley,
who has written to the Culture
Minister to express his concerns. Or
perhaps Serota means he doesn’t need
to want to win their support, as he
takes it for granted.
Artist trustees were originally
senior figures with established
careers, such as Antony Caro, but
after 10 years in office, Serota
came to this conclusion: “Tony was
well over 60 when he became a
trustee. He was a very effective
trustee, actually. He cared
passionately about certain things
and was a powerful force… but it
just seems to work better when you
have artists who are a new
generation, or indeed erring on the
younger side, really.”
For someone who doesn’t have any
part to play in trustees’
appointment, he speaks with
remarkable confidence and authority
on the sort of trustees he prefers.
One starts to feel he may have quite
a significant part to play after
all. If Caro was “a very effective
trustee”, in what way exactly does
it “work better” with artists
“erring on the younger side”?
Logically the conclusion must be
that it works better if they are
less effective.
Being in mid-career, they have
much to gain from the Tate’s
acquisition and display of their
work, with Serota a dominating
factor in such decisions – making
him someone whom it is not in their
interest to upset, and creating an
unhealthy conflict of interest, when
it comes to their overseeing of his
role.
Serota is quite clear about the
power he wields, as he explained in
The Independent on Sunday
in 1993: “Clearly, I have to be
aware of the fact that if I decide
to make a show of an artist at the
Tate, this will influence the way
people regard him or her.” Indeed.
He has a vigorous, if somewhat
sycophantic, riposte to any censure:
“people are falling over themselves
to buy Chris Ofili’s work and Peter
Doig’s work. The issue is not, ‘Is
the Tate doing this to curry favour
with them?’ but, actually, ‘Can the
Tate get hold of the work?’ ” This
may have some truth in 2008, but
between 1998 and 2004, according to
art insurer Hiscox, Ofili’s auction
prices fell by 24%. An Ofili work
sold in 2001 for £117,038, which
remained his record until 2005, just
before the announcement of the
Tate’s purchase of its then-trustee
Ofili’s The Upper Room (by
which time knowledge of it would
have permeated the artworld).
Suddenly Ofili’s auction price shot
up to £554,258.
On 14 November 2006, a Peter Doig
painting with an upper estimate of
£1.5 million sold at Sotheby’s for
only £445,000. On 5 February 2007,
(former Tate trustee) Doig’s major
retrospective exhibition opened at
Tate Britain. On 7 February 2007, a
Doig painting sold at Sotheby’s for
£5,732,000.
Serota now says: “Chris Ofili
sold us The Upper Room at a
price way below what he could have
achieved elsewhere… Many works by
Ofili had sold for higher prices at
auction.” If this is the case, why
in June 2003 did Serota say, “Of
course the price will have to come
down”, and, furthermore, even though
the price didn’t come down, why did
he go ahead and purchase it
regardless?
His excuse for what the Charity
Commission concluded was the
breaking of charity law over the
Ofili purchase is that “we had been
following a practice which had been
running for fifty years,” and, as
The Guardian pointed out,
“Extraordinarily, at no point was
the Tate’s breach of law picked up
by any present or former Tate
director or trustee, or by the
museum’s major funder and regulator,
the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport. It went unnoticed by
current trustees with an expertise
in regulatory affairs including Sir
Howard Davies, former chair of the
Financial Services Authority, and
Paul Myners, chair of Marks &
Spencer and the Guardian Media
Group.”
Equally extraordinarily, it took
me ten minutes on the Charity
Commission web site to find out. But
then I was not living in an ivory
tower of institutional malpractice
fostered by an executive without
objective scrutiny under an inbred
governance lacking rigorous
accountability because of political
oversight enacting an arms-length
policy to avoid getting its hands
dirty.
Serota assures us, though, that
all is well: “We’re a more open
organization than any equivalent
organization in the world. Can you
find the minutes of the trustees’
meeting of the Museum of Modern Art
on their website, or the Pompidou?
You can’t. So we’re at the forefront
of being as open as we possibly
can.”
The logic is decidedly wonky, but
then so is the message we are meant
to agree with. When I first looked
at the Tate trustee minutes online,
I noticed an odd discrepancy between
them and material I had obtained
under the Freedom of Information
Act. I wrote to Tate Chairman, Paul
Myners, to query this, and he
admitted there were two versions of
the minutes – the real ones and the
ones on the web site that were
“considered appropriate for
immediate public disclosure.”
Following my complaint, the Tate
then indicated in the online minutes
where they were censoring any items
that were “confidential or
commercially sensitive.” Here is an
example of such an excised, and
consequently garbled, passage from
the July 2003 minutes, regarding the
Ofili purchase:
“Jon Snow wondered whether
Information has been exempted under
s. 43 (2) of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000. to enable
the acquisition reflected the
considerable interest.”
However, I had already been
supplied with a less excised
version, so we can see exactly the
sort of thing the Tate considers is
not appropriate for public
disclosure:
“Jon Snow wondered whether [X’s]
withdrawal reflected a change in the
market value of the group, but
Nicholas Serota assured him that
this was not the case: that Victoria
Miro had secured a group of
benefactors, including [Y] to enable
the acquisition reflected the
considerable interest.”
We are not allowed to know that
Jon Snow questioned the value of
The Upper Room, and that Serota
immediately resolved the objection
with a convolved rationale that
rested on the fact that Victoria
Miro – the gallery owner who was
trying to sell the work to the Tate
– had persuaded some collectors to
give money to the Tate, so the Tate
could give it back to her.
This is doubly embarrassing, as
only the previous month Serota had
been insisting that the price had to
come down. There is no reason for
this part of the minutes to be
redacted under section 43 (2), which
applies to trade secrets or
commercially prejudicial material,
and it is not permitted to withhold
material under the Freedom of
Information Act simply because it’s
embarrassing, so the explanation for
the redaction would be another
interesting one to add to the
lengthening list.
“The Stuckists Punk Victorian”,
Walker Art Gallery, 2004 Liverpool
Biennial.
Here’s another passage that was
initially omitted from the minutes:
“Mr Debbaut explained that the
Stuckists had offered a large number
of works to Tate (some, but it was
not clear all, as gifts) following
an exhibition held at the Walker
Gallery in Liverpool. Curators and
the Collection Committee had
recommended against accepting the
gift. The Trustees were advised that
there may be some media coverage of
the Stuckists’ likely negative
reaction to this decision.”
I don’t see anything confidential
or commercially sensitive about that
either. My observation of the Tate
is that they divulge only what they
know they will have to anyway, now
that the Freedom of Information Act
is in force, and make a virtue out
of a necessity. In February this
year, the press reported the Tate’s
purchase of The Chapman Family
Collection, an installation by
Jake and Dinos Chapman, but the Tate
refused at the time to divulge the
cost. That doesn’t count in my book
as the forefront of being open. The
price was published sometime later,
buried in the Tate’s boring annual
accounts, which no one bothers to
read. The price of the work was
£1,500,000, which netted its
original owner, Charles Saatchi, a
cool £500,000 profit out of the Tate
on (what was reported as) his
original purchase price. No wonder
the Tate kept schtum.
I don’t know why Serota considers
himself hard done by at the hands of
the press: “You can’t have it both
ways; on the one hand we’re
criticised for not having bought
Rachel Whiteread’s house or Damien
Hirst’s shark, and then when we do
go out and buy a Chris Ofili or a
Peter Doig, we’re also criticised.”
It seems to have escaped his
earnestly pained attention that
Ofili and Doig were trustees, and
Whiteread and Hirst weren’t. This is
a difference that other people,
including the Charity Commission,
see as being of considerable
significance.
Finally we come to the culprits:
“I’m not alone in this. They bang on
about the Tate not doing so, but
there are plenty of other museums in
this country who could be buying
[the Stuckists’] work, but aren’t.”
What have other museums in the
country got to do with it? And
what’s this “buying” business? We
weren’t trying to sell work to the
Tate: we offered a donation of 160
paintings (all of which were
rejected, some just because of their
titles presumably, as they hadn’t
even been looked at). I don’t know
what other museums’ policies are,
but according to Tate Britain
director Stephen Deuchar, “If you
want a comprehensive overview of art
made in Britain or art made about
Britain, Tate Britain is the place.
We have almost limitless capacity in
the years ahead to explore British
art.”
What a load of hogwash, and how
peculiar that Serota is reduced to
vindicating his own behaviour as
director of the national gallery of
modern and British art by pointing
to provincial museums, which, if
anything, follow the lead of the
Tate. As it happens, a national
museum, The Walker Art Gallery,
mounted a major five month show of
Stuckist work for the 2004 Liverpool
Biennial, which Serota knows full
well, as he visited it. Alexis
Hunter has just emailed me
indignantly with a list of 25
museums and suchlike institutions
which hold her work, ranging from
the University of Houston to the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art (but not the Tate).
Finally we reach Serota’s
clinching argument: “I don’t know
where this idea that I don’t like
figurative painting has emerged from
because frankly if you look at the
work that we’ve acquired, I’ve quite
frequently shown artists who work in
a figurative fashion… Some of my
best friends are figurative
painters!” Well, frankly I couldn’t
give a monkey’s who his friends are,
nor for that matter what he does or
doesn’t like. I’m rather more
concerned with his acquisitions
policy, as examined in Stuck Inn V,
with which I rest my case.