Nam June Paik review: move over Tim Berners-Lee, here's the real web prophet

Tate Modern, London
He built a garden of tellies, revelled in digital overload and foresaw the internet back in 1974. What a shame this revealing show smothers Paik in seriousness

The first room says it all. By which I mean it shows you all the work by Nam June Paik you need to understand his contribution to modern art. There you will see, among other things, his masterpiece: TV Garden, an array of different-sized monitors embedded among greenery, their multicoloured screens blossoming like flowers in a gorgeous electronic pastoral.

The more you think about this installation, the more insidiously provocative it is. Paik, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, was a polymath philosopher who prophesied our technological age. In 1974, he predicted the coming of an “electronic super highway” that would link everyone on Earth. Move over, Tim Berners-Lee. In 1994, when his vision was coming true, Paik celebrated it with a work called Internet Dreams, in which multiple ever-changing screens glory in information overload.

His friend Joseph Beuys keeps intruding memorably into the show

At Tate Modern, London, from 17 October to 9 February.

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