Tate Modern at 15: still delivering the shock of the new

The Bankside museum has transformed modern art from an elite cult into mass entertainment, but is it time to get down to some proper studying?

Its dark Satanic hulk rising out of nondescript land on the wrong side of the Thames was the shock of the new set down in brick. It was 1999, and I was taking a hard-hat tour of the nearly completed conversion of Bankside power station into Tate Modern. In my mind I visualised Jackson Pollock paintings in the as-yet empty galleries and a heavy metal Richard Serra sculpture in the colossal Turbine Hall. Modernism was coming and it was going to change Britain.

A year after that, and exactly 15 years ago this week, a brass band pumped out Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass at Tate Modern’s opening party. Writers and politicians mingled in the crowd, a theatrical pageant of New Labour Britain finding its perfect stage against architecture redolent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But where were the Richard Serras? This was the shock of the new, but not as I knew it.

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