It's carnivorous. That was the esteemed art critic Waldemar Januszczak's word for it. Januszczak, who has been reviewing art shows with a double-page spread in the Sunday Times for years, totted up how many Tate exhibitions he covered in 2004 and discovered that an absurdly large proportion of his pieces had been devoted to Nicholas Serota's empire. "Tate staggers its exhibitions, so that all autumn and throughout spring, you are covering Tate shows in one way or another," he explained. Which in a weekly paper means that other, just as interesting, exhibitions get ignored. I suspect that if you looked at the other weekly nationals, including the NS, you would find the situation with their art reviews is the same.
It's not just London, either; there is Tate Liverpool, and Tate St Ives, not to mention the other newsworthy events at Tate: the annual monster that is the Turner Prize, the acquisition of nationally vital paintings (step forward Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Omai, currently in the news), the extension of Tate Modern, and various projects with the BBC, coverage of which has seeped even into this column. Tate issued a press release when it changed its official stationery, for heaven's sake.
As a response to the T-Rex that Tate has become, Januszczak is refusing to review all Tate exhibitions for the foreseeable future. He began his policy with a big one, boycotting the Joseph Beuys show at Tate Modern in order to review William Orpen at the Imperial War Museum, an exhibition we in the Back Half also feature this week.
Surely we should admire a gallery that is so ambitiously energetic? It's not quite so simple. Januszczak claims that the special exhibitions, which charge a hefty entry fee, are a "covert way of charging to get into the gallery"; indeed, he believes that Tate's punishing exhibition schedule is directly driving gallery policy.
Do people realise how vital the charging exhibition is to an otherwise free collection? Probably not - unless, that is, free entry itself is challenged. I was in Paris last weekend with the family; it was a sunny Sunday morning and we decided to wander over to the Louvre for a cultural experience. Only for an hour or two. Arriving at the giant glass Pyramid, we were dismayed to see a snaking queue of no fewer than 500 people patiently waiting in line. It was just before 11am. We were puzzled. Perhaps the gallery opened at 11am; perhaps there was a special exhibition on.
I asked a guard. "It's Sunday," he told me. "Free entry." We dutifully went to the back of the queue, at which point another guard came over and hauled us out. Thanks to the presence of 12-week-old Lucien Millard, we were fast-tracked past the shuttered ticket office and silent turnstiles. No one batted an eyelid. Wandering through the immaculate galleries on the top floor some time later, I looked out into the courtyard, saw that the queue was still half a kilometre long and toyed with the idea of offering the slumbering Lucien to someone at the back. For a modest sum.
Tate Britain's latest blockbuster, "Turner Whistler Monet" (entry fee £10), has just opened, hard on the heels of Anthony Caro and Joseph Beuys at Tate Modern and Richard Wentworth at Tate Liverpool. Will Januszczak keep his word and ignore the show of the season? Yes, but his paper won't. Frank Whitford is to have the double-page spread instead.
