Tate Britain's 'The 90s' Show Panned as Magazine Spread — SkimNews
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- Edward Enninful, former Vogue editor, curated Tate Britain's "The 90s: Art and Fashion" exhibition, which the review says prioritizes fashion photography over contemporary art and reads like a glossy magazine layout rather than a real show
- Tate Britain's exhibition spans just seven rooms, ending abruptly and offering too little space for the art to be properly seen or judged, according to the reviewer
- Jake and Dinos Chapman's sculpture "Great Deeds Against the Dead" — a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses on a tree, based on a Goya print of Napoleonic war atrocities — is singled out as the show's closest moment of depth
- Juergen Teller's 1996 photograph "Kristen McMenamy No 3," hung beside Sarah Lucas's "Chicken Knickers," is "exposed as just a clever stylist whose images lack poetry or meaning," in the reviewer's eyes
- Gary Hume's metallic, mirroring painting of Kate Moss is praised as one of the few moments where fashion and art genuinely overlap, evoking Richard Hamilton's pop-art commentary on celebrity
- Artists including Helen Chadwick, Hamad Butt, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller, Mat Collishaw, and the late Christine Borland are described as underrepresented, tokenistic, or missing entirely
- Enninful's selection omits mainstream British pop culture of the era such as Oasis, Blur, and Fat Les, with the reviewer suggesting he is "too sophisticated" to include them
Why it matters: Tate Britain staged the Turner Prize during the very 1990s YBA era now being revisited, yet this exhibition devotes only seven rooms and marginal space to artists like Emin, Ofili, Deller and Chadwick — sidelining a decade in which, as the source notes, Britain became better known for new art than new novels, in favor of Enninful's fashion-led vision.
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