How small and inconsequential the vast Turbine Hall made us feel from the start. Housed in a former electricity generator, Tate Modern was always about power. Replacing monument and hallowed masterpiece with fleeting experience and temporary spectacle - hanging out under Eliasson’s sun, hurtling down Carsten Höller’s slides - it has, since opening in 2000, reigned unchallenged as the world’s most popular modern art museum. Tate Modern worked to a new reality: that 21st-century artists and their audiences are global, multi-referential, democratic, and easily bored. And Tate Modern, which launched these works in the early 2000s, transformed at a stroke and forever the idea of a museum.Įliot believed art’s evolving tradition created “the mind of Europe”, and through the 20th century the primary role of museums was still to preserve the canon. Olafur Eliasson’s blazing artificial sun “The Weather Project” forged a social context for the romantic sublime. “When a new work of art is created,” TS Eliot said, something “happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.” Louise Bourgeois’s spider “Maman” made us see expression in brutal-big steel sculpture.
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