Tate's '90s Show Criticized as Glossy Spread Over Art — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Tate Britain's "The 90s: Art and Fashion," curated by former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, spans just seven rooms and the reviewer argues it prioritizes fashion over the conceptual art of the decade, with the final room offering "no prologue to more art, bigger art."
- Jake and Dinos Chapman's sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead — dismembered corpses on a tree based on a Goya print of Napoleonic atrocities — is the work the reviewer credits with bringing "closest to a moment of depth" in what they call a "dismally shallow show."
- Damien Hirst is represented by "a couple of small, harmless-looking sharks balanced on a circular rail," which the reviewer says is insufficient to convey how his early work once seemed to confront death — "not enough of it to even begin to decide" whether the 1990s art has aged.
- Helen Chadwick receives "two tokenistic eerie photoworks," Hamad Butt is "squeezed to the end of the gallery," and Chris Ofili (No Woman, No Cry) and Tracey Emin (one neon) get only passing representation; Jeremy Deller, Mat Collishaw, and the late Christine Borland are absent entirely.
- Juergen Teller's 1996 photograph Kristen McMenamy No 3 — showing the model naked with a lipstick heart reading "Versace" — is hung beside Sarah Lucas's 1997 Chicken Knickers, and the reviewer argues the pairing exposes Teller as "just a clever stylist" lacking Lucas's "genius for estrangement."
- Alexander McQueen's costumes dominate the "body horror" room, which the reviewer calls "mannered and pretentious," and an entire wall is given to Sean Ellis photographs for The Face, while mainstream 1990s British pop culture — Oasis, Blur, Fat Les — is entirely absent.
Why it matters: Tate Britain was the institutional home of the Turner Prize during the 1990s, the decade when Young British Art went from afterthought to global phenomenon, and the reviewer argues the institution is now giving that legacy short shrift — only seven rooms, fashion-led curation, and major YBA figures reduced to a single shark or neon. The gap matters because if Tate cannot stage a serious 1990s retrospective, no one else will, and a generation of artists risks being misremembered through Vogue's lens rather than their own work.
Ask SkimNews
