Don’t blame Maria Balshaw for Tate Modern’s failures. Its lack of ambition goes much deeper than that Tate Modern

IIn the past nine years, Tate has had some successes, but its failures have become embarrassing. The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is currently occupied by a weak installation that would be weak in a normal-sized art space, let alone this gigantic one. It becomes truly difficult to understand Tate’s priorities when it selects artists for its annual Turbine Hall commission. The Turner Prize is more ambiguous. Once a stage for shocking and provocative art that engaged a large audience – whether they were for or against – has retreated into willful obscurity, and his travels around the UK are beginning to look like a piece of studied veracity. What’s the point of showing it in Bradford when the arcane tastes of the urban elite are topping the shortlist?

Is Maria Balshaw, who is leaving her position as director of the Tate, solely responsible for this? No, but she might bravely take the blame and allow the organization to reinvent itself as it needs to, and quickly. The achievements Tate emphasizes in announcing its departure center around how it has “diversified” the collection, gallery and audiences. But in this noble endeavour, there has been a loss of artistic ambition, aesthetic excitement, raw horror, and beauty. Sometimes we really want art for art’s sake and Tate missed that.

This is horribly evident in the collection’s exhibits, which critics often don’t write about but which visitors have to endure. The Tate Modern galleries have descended into a state of humiliating incoherence, and in the past few years treasures such as the Rothkos, Picassos and Surrealists have often been out of sight. The redesign at Tate Britain has been criticized in 2023, justifiably harshly, for putting politics before art, patronizing everyone with naively stated readings of British history – like criticizing Baroque artists for being unconventional or Hogarth for being incongruous. I can think about these things for myself. Or maybe better things.

There were some great Tate performances as well, but they were often marred by ridiculous side battles. I was blown away by Cézanne’s great film, which is a huge hit in 2022. I’m not bothered by contemporary artists being invited to make politically charged, irrelevant interventions – but really, when you try to understand what Cézanne is doing in paintings that divide the sun-scorched rocks of Provence into cubism and abstraction, it doesn’t help either to figure out what makes one of these stone landscapes colonial. This would have puzzled Edward Said.

However, since Cézanne and Rodin, the magnificent retrospectives of modern greats that used to grace the Tate Modern – beginning in the 1910s with the unforgettable Matisse Picasso – have diminished. Tate brags about Lee Bowery! As one of the highlights of the Balshaw era, but this was a missed opportunity: the great unmissable exhibition would have been the one collecting all of Burri’s Lucian Freud photographs.

So the critic complains and complains and – guess what? – The audience agrees. People voted by absenteeism. Poor attendance at the Tate Museums is supposed to be the reason for Balshaw’s departure. But she should not be made a scapegoat by an institution that simply acts regardless. Tate has made arrogant and crude choices to put ideology before art, merit before aesthetic pleasure, and bad politics before thoughtful extremism. She needs to change her ways, not just her boss. Otherwise, given that Penelope Curtis left Tate Britain following criticism in 2020, while its current head seems impervious to worse performances, this would feel like another misogynistic removal of a powerful woman.