Tate Britain’s ’90s Show Is All Scene, No Substance

There is a source of tension raging across the art world lately: the conflict between accessibility and anti-intellectualism, as museums face the challenge of making art feel less elitist, less cold, and less boring without dumbing down to the point of meaninglessness. Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, “The 90s: Art and Fashion,” falls hard on the side of meaningless anti-intellectualism.

The exhibition is curated by Edward Enninful, who was most recently editor-in-chief of British Vogue but, more importantly for this exhibition, became the fashion director of the magazine i-D at the age of 18 in 1990 and led it through the turbulent, dynamic decade that is the subject of his show. Tate has never worked with a celebrity curator in this way before, and Enninful’s presence is strangely felt throughout the exhibition. A wedding gift he received from Steve McQueen—a photograph of McQueen’s hands—hangs on a wall. Many, many i-D spreads are in cases throughout the galleries, some including photographs of Enninful. There is a striking focus on Black masculinity, which is the prism through which Enninful experienced the ’90s. Yet his subjectivity is not clearly articulated, leaving one to wonder: Is it his voice we are sensing through the wall texts and object labels, or is it a more neutral “museum” voice? Is Enninful the subject of the exhibition, via his presence in the lives of the artists and models represented here, or is he the curator?

Being a museum curator is a job that does, actually, require expertise. (I speak with the bias of being one myself). It is a powerful, often invisible role that shapes perceptions of truth and cultural meaning. The trend toward treating it as a celebrity hobby or a passion project is symptomatic of the current wider social phobia of experts and intellectuals. Throughout this exhibition, Enninful contradicts himself: The decade of the ’90s in Britain was about “critiquing commercialism,” but it was also about groundbreaking ad campaigns. It was about “challenging beauty standards,” but also “democratizing beauty.” No point of distinction between fine art and visual culture is identified in Enninful’s show, so fashion, commercial and personal photography, and fine art share space. That could be interesting—it could be a critical choice—but instead it feels like an oversight.

The art and visual culture in this show generally does something. It either embraces or rejects commercialism. It tells a new, sometimes important, story of race, class, or gender in Britain. It highlights what one wall text ambiguously describes as “importance of intimacy in turbulent times.” But is it good? Not especially. Enninful seems to have gone out of his way to choose bad works. Helen Chadwick, a largely good artist, is represented by two works that rank among her weakest. A cast of a hot water bottle that represents a torso by Rachel Whiteread, a really good artist, somehow manages to be the best thing in the show (along with Chris Ofili’s 1998 painting No Woman, No Cry). Small, quotidian, and tactile, it evokes absence and presence at once, the bitter fleetingness of modern life.

But most of the stuff in these galleries? The endless snapshots of parties, wallpaper covered in butts, the many photographs of Kate Moss, videos of fashion shows, enlarged ad campaign stills—very little of it is good. It conveys a certain nostalgia for a heady era, and it makes a strong case for Enninful’s relevance to it. He knew everyone who is anyone, it seems. But that doesn’t make what he chose to show good art, or even art at all. It’s odd, because the ’90s were famously good years for British art: the time of the YBAs and a shifting and condensing sense of British identity, of optimism and progress. The decade fueled the founding of Tate Modern and Frieze London in the early 2000s, and has led to London’s current position as a nexus of international artists and remarkable historic and contemporary art spaces. You would not know that from this exhibition.

Art museums have to fight for relevance in our new attention economy, just like everything else. We are constantly asked to defend them, to make a case for their purpose. With this exhibition, Tate situates the museum alongside the celebrity economy of influence. Supposedly celebrating the last “analog” decade, it instead feels like an act of surrender to the perceived glibness of the digital age. Old-fashioned as it may seem, I don’t think we should equate art with “content.” There is always an appetite for great art, and there is also always an appetite to consider whether, and why, art is great or not. To join the tide of anti-intellectualism that refuses to take this seriously or rise to the challenge of doing so, as Tate has done with this exhibition, is a grave shame.