Jon's reviews
Review of Tate Modern
28 Jul 07, 08:51
An acquired taste. 
I have been to this art gallery on many occasions. It is opposite St Paul's Cathedral over the Millennium Bridge there are attraction near by. Shakespeare's Globe is around the corner. The gallery is inside what used to be Bankside Power Station. Parking near by will be very difficult.
You enter from the side into the Turbine Hall, a huge room running the length and height of the building. On the left is a book shop and then it's to the escalator to go up to the first floor. There may be an exhibition in the Turbine Hall, it is half the size of the gallery.
There are three floors of exhibitions everything from Andy Warhol through Gilbert and George to Van Gogh and probably W, X, Y, Z catered for in the surname stakes. There is also a separate exhibition at all times, which you pay to get into, for the cost of less than £10. Each floor is packed with free exhibits.
Art for art sake and money for my sake, as the song goes. Every exhibit is very expensive but security is not heavy, it seems to be mainly by students in T-shirts rather than by security guards like they have in the National Gallery. I have never been to this gallery when it was not been packed with people.
It appeals to students and Sunday Times and Guardian reading art types. They are the arty so they will give nothing a value, unless it knows how to be a form? It is all form over function, the more useless an object seems to be the more artistic it will be thought. The visitors know all the theory but care little about the content, it is like a social club for postmodern people. Stuck up? They are and will wind you up if you do not know what you are taking about. They are experts on the wind up.
When I was there they were showing a film with very loud music as if some thing was happening in the film but it was a film of the Thames outside the gallery in 1970, which was unused was it ironic? The film showed how the area has been regenerated, as it was a bomb site at that time.
Recommended, by me as it is free after all but it is not much of an aesthetic experience like a trip to the National Gallery would be full of tourists. It is more a postmodern theoretical experience filled as it is with arty and student types, so is an acquired taste.
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