Tate's 90s Show Panned as Fashion Spread, Not Art — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Tate Britain's exhibition "The 90s: Art and Fashion," curated by former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, is described in a Guardian review as "not a real exhibition" but "a magazine spread," with fashion photography dominating conceptual art.
- Jake and Dinos Chapman's sculpture "Great Deeds Against the Dead" — dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree, based on a Goya print of Napoleonic atrocities — is the only work the reviewer credits with genuine depth, asking whether art can have moral purpose.
- Major 1990s figures receive tokenistic representation: Damien Hirst has a couple of small sharks balanced on a rail, Rachel Whiteread is shown only via an early cast of the inside of a hot-water bottle, and Isabella Blow gets more coverage than Whiteread.
- Juergen Teller's 1996 photograph "Kristen McMenamy No 3" — a naked McMenamy smoking with a lipstick heart reading "Versace" — is "exposed as just a clever stylist whose images lack poetry," while hung alongside Sarah Lucas's 1997 "Chicken Knickers," which delivers genuine "estrangement."
- Alexander McQueen dominates the "body horror" room with costumes the reviewer calls mannered and pretentious, suggesting they may express "a hatred of women whom he forced to go on catwalks in suits of wire and steel bouquets."
- Notable 1990s artists are absent — Jeremy Deller, Mat Collishaw, and the late Christine Borland — and mainstream Britpop (Oasis, Blur, Fat Les) gets no room, while the entire show fits into just seven galleries.
Why it matters: Tate Britain is the institution that staged the Turner Prize during the 1990s YBA boom and profited from artists like Hirst and Emin; the reviewer argues the gallery is now treating that legacy as disposable set dressing rather than mounting a serious retrospective, with weightier works like Hamad Butt's death-obsessed art and the Chapmans' Goya-derived sculpture left to do the heavy lifting while fashion imagery dominates seven rooms.
Ask SkimNews
