HOUSEKEEPING - AND A CARBUNCLE

Time to start updating and re-organizing the blogroll. Blognor Regis, Iain Dale, and newbie (welcome!)  David Aaronovitch are first up. When I sort out the blogging-for-idiots instructions, I'll try to add a photograph too. It's not that I'm shy - I just still haven't got the hang of the controls.

Lots of cuttings bit the dust this week too. A whole wheelbarrow-load. I don't know why I'm so prone to hoard newsprint when almost everything's available on-line. Old habits die hard, I suppose. Weird to revisit so many columnists and their somewhat off-centre predictions. I'd better not name names. All right, just the one then. It's my all-time favourite pundit, Mary Dejevsky, announcing peace in our time in February 2003: "Could all this talk of war actually be nothing more than a giant bluff?" Er, no. (Then again, which of us got things 100% right?)

But this piece is interesting. (I can't Google it up, in fact, so I'm glad I hung on to the inky version.) It's Daniel Johnson, writing in the Telegraph in the month that Tate Modern opened for business in 2000. I feel much the same way about the place, which is why I've avoided making more than a couple of visits:

Tate Modern is seen as sublime because it is vast and intimidating: it panders to the giganticism and worship of power with which the new anti-art intends to impress us...

Fascist art is powerful. The taboo since 1945 has allowed us to forget just how powerful. It was an international style and it left its mark on Britain. Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station could easily be the work of Albert Speer: not only the massive brick facade, but the vertical windows are reminiscent of the tribune at Nuremberg... It was Speer who, long before Lord Rogers, wanted to build the biggest dome on earth in Berlin, some six times higher than the Millennium Dome. And why did Sir Nicholas Serota have to dress his staff as blackshirts?

In case you think Johnson is some cranky right-wing fogey, it's worth noting that the New Republic's critic Jed Perl [pdf link] felt much the same way about the landmark:

The vast entrance that they have made out of the power station's turbine hall may look great in photo spreads, but when I walked into the space, which has the numbingly overscaled and underdeveloped proportions of a fascist nightmare, I felt like a speck of dust.

I've linked to Speer's dome design before, but here's another picture of it. (Those are people in the foreground, by the way. More specks...) See the resemblance? I've mentioned it to friends before, but because they all love the Tate, they think I'm raving.

Comments

[ilana]

I understand what you're saying but I don't find the space intimidating just because it's big - any more than it's intimidating to look at a huge sweep of landscape, especially sea (just spent some time on a boat!). I've loved some of the installations they've had in that space - you can just lose yourself in them.