The Tate will receive an extra £6m from the government to help fund the cost of running Tate Modern, we have learned. The agreement, which has not been formally announced, was made ahead of the General Election, which saw the Conservative Party win a slim majority.
The promise of extra money for the Tate is a remarkable achievement by the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, who 15 years ago secured an extra £5m from the then Labour government so that Tate Modern could open without charging for admission.
At that time, public spending on the arts was increasing; now cuts are the norm. In its most recently published annual accounts of 2013-14, the Tate notes that, like other national museums and galleries, it anticipated that its grant-in-aid would be cut by 5%, on top of earlier cuts made by the coalition government since 2010. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is due to announce the next spending review, promises further austerity.
Ed Vaizey, the minister for the arts since 2010 in the coalition government who remains in post in the new Conservative one, told us about the extra money for the Tate on the eve of the election. A spokeswoman for the Tate confirms: “Late last year the government in principle committed to an uplift in grant-in-aid to support the running of the new Tate Modern.”
The promised £6m represents a 17% increase in Tate’s 2012-13 grant. A spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) declined to say more other than “budgets will be set out by the Chancellor at the next spending review”.
Credit must also go to Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, who announced in April that he planned to leave in the summer of 2017 to run Berlin’s Volksbühne. Tate Modern’s £215m extension, which has been designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects of the original conversion of the former power station, is due to open at the end of 2016.
The extra government funding is a vote of confidence in the gallery of Modern and contemporary art on Bankside, which attracted around 5.8 million visitors in 2014. One argument the Tate makes for the expansion is that the gallery has twice as many visitors as the Museum of Modern Art in New York but Tate Modern “is half the size”.
Building the ten-storey brick-clad extension, which the architect Jacques Herzog describes as “pyramidal”, has been a financial challenge for the Tate. The recession slowed fundraising; in 2007 the government made an “exceptional” grant of £50m and the Mayor of London gave a further £7m but private giving has been sluggish. The last publicly announced grant was £5m from the Wolfson Foundation and £10m from the Eyal Ofer Family, both in 2013. A Tate spokeswoman declined to say if it had reached its fundraising target or how much still remained to be raised from private donors and foundations, saying there would be an announcement later in the year.
Meanwhile, to help with the Tate Modern project’s cashflow, the DCMS agreed an advance of £8.5m against its grant-in-aid in 2011-12. So in the past financial year the Tate as a whole, which includes Tate Britain and its outposts in Liverpool and St Ives, had to make do with £24.4m in government subsidy, according to its accounts, down from £34.9m in 2012-13. While the reduction was planned, it cannot have been easy to absorb, or compensated for through increased income generation.
The additional 21,000 sq. m of space, which the extension will provide, increases the size of the gallery by 60%. It will enable the Tate to present more of its collection, as well as more large-scale installations, performance art and temporary exhibitions. The public had a preview of the potential of the former oil tanks in the basement as a space for video and performance art when they were temporarily opened in 2012. In the tower above The Tanks three floors will be devoted to the collection and exhibitions. In addition to 5,600 sq. metres of display space there will be 1,300 sq. metres over two floors devoted to education. A bridge on level four will link the extension to the existing galleries. Improved amenities include two restaurants, two rooms for Tate members and a viewing terrace on the top floor. A grand spiral staircase, which the Tate describes on its website as a “ceremonial boulevard”, will provides spaces for visitors to gather and sit down in the heart of the new building.
When the Mayor of Berlin announced at the end of April that Chris Dercon would be the next creative director of the Volksbühne, the German media reported that the prestigious theatre in Mitte, which is due to gain space in the former airport Tempelhof, will see its budgets increase from €5m to €22m.
The Belgian-born curator’s legacy at Tate Modern includes championing performance art and expanding the definition of Modernism at Tate beyond traditional Western boundaries. In a statement, Serota said that Dercon has helped open the gallery to a wider world through his support for a more international programme, photography, live performance and film. Whoever succeeds Dercon will inherit the space to show much more of the collection. The extra £6m will also prove handy to help balance the budget.
Decision time at the Hayward Gallery
The Belgian artist Carsten Höller returns to London’s South Bank, eight years after his slides transformed the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Höller’s Hayward Gallery show, which opens on 10 June (until 6 September) is called Decision, an apt title as works will challenge visitors to make up their minds from start to finish: there will be two entrances and two exits, for example. While the faint-hearted can leave the normal way, the courageous can make a high-speed exit down one of two slides. The gallery’s director, Ralph Rugoff, says: “We removed some roof lights, so you climb up through the ceiling and enter the shell of the building.” The gallery is due to close for a two-year revamp after Höller’s show finishes, which includes upgrading the roof lights.