The Tate Modern, the cathedral (open to taxi drivers) of contemporary art, turns 25.

Maman , a fearsome 9-meter-high bronze spider with a marble egg sac, invaded the turbine hall of the former Bankside power station . Louise Bourgeois 's sculpture was truly imposing, and the first to see it, even before the press or art critics, were the taxi drivers of London's legendary black cabs . Word of mouth has always been the best marketing campaign, so it was considered essential that those who drove people around the city knew where this experiment was located south of the Thames.

Many had their doubts when the idea of ​​opening a modern art museum in the London borough of Southwark was first proposed. It wasn't exactly the most popular museum back in 2000. And the British didn't have a particular fondness for this type of work either.

When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in a Manhattan townhouse in 1929, it faced incomprehension from a public still uncomfortable with the abstract. When the Centre Georges Pompidou opened its Paris location in 1977, philosophers denounced the multidisciplinary museum as a shopping mall. But with London's Tate Modern, a brick building larger than either of the previous two, success was immediate.

Rising imposingly from a once-forgotten stretch of the South Bank, the 99-meter tower of the former power station sent a message of regeneration and possibilities to the rest of the world. And the world responded. The forecast was for two million visitors in its first year; but five million turned up.

The forecast was for two million visitors to the Tate Modern in its first year; five million came.

Tate Modern is now celebrating its 25th anniversary, transformed into the 'cathedral of contemporary art'. Rather than imitating its competitors, it rewrote the rules and set the standard for 21st-century museums . Its success has been, from the outset, not only a landmark in British history, but also for the global art world. Four of its five directors have been foreigners.

The 25th anniversary, however, isn't all champagne and blockbusters. As with most cultural institutions, Brexit , the pandemic , and the funding crisis have taken their toll. While the British Museum and the Natural History Museum have recovered from the pandemic, Tate Modern has not. In 2024, one million fewer people entered the gallery compared to the pre-Covid era. The crisis has forced the Tate Group to cut 7% of its workforce to reduce costs , just five years after offering 167 voluntary redundancies.

Some critics, such as Lara Brown of the Spectator , believe that curators are now living in terror of any public criticism. “It took the gallery three years to get around to showing Philip Guston Now, due to concerns that some of the artist’s works might be offensive. Guston’s work, much of which focuses on the Ku Klux Klan , offers a critique of racism, antisemitism, and fascism. But at the Tate, where staff fear that visitors might be offended by even a negative depiction of white supremacy, it was decided to postpone the exhibition “until we feel that the powerful message of social and racial justice at the heart of Philip Guston’s work can be interpreted more clearly,” she clarifies.

However, Jason Farago of The New York Times emphasizes that “the Tate Modern is the Museum of the Century, whether we like it or not.” “Its legacy extends far beyond the South Bank, into the deep structure of the industry, where it has transformed, for better or worse, public expectations of museums around the world,” the expert asserts.

The history of the Tate Modern is linked to one name: Nicholas Serota , appointed in 2014 by the prestigious magazine Art Review as the “most powerful man in the art world.” He headed the Tate group from 1988 to 2016. That’s nothing.

When he took the reins, Robert Mugabe had just become president of Zimbabwe, Margaret Thatcher was in her prime, and the United States was still in the Reagan era.

The neoclassical Tate Gallery in Pimlico had become too small due to a strange double function: it housed the national collection of British art from the 16th century to the present day, including a huge legacy of paintings and watercolours by JMW Turner , but also a shabby collection of so-called "modern foreign art", which largely reflected the old British taste for nature study and landscape.

Serota's solution was to split the project. The former Tate Gallery would house British art (renamed Tate Britain), while the international collection would have a new home. Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron won a design competition to transform Bankside Power Station. Just across the river is St. Paul's Cathedral. The Millennium Bridge, designed by Norman Foster , linked the old with the new.

Serota devised several solutions that would make the Tate Modern, for a time, the country's main tourist attraction , but which would also call into question some of the fundamental functions of museums in the past, including, to the astonishment of many critics, replacing chronological organization with a thematic one.

A second measure was to ignore modernism in Western Europe and the United States and seek outsize value in "emerging markets." The gallery announced its ambitions in 2001 with "Century City," its first major loan exhibition, which portrayed the history of 20th-century art as a decade-by-decade grand tour, with stops in Paris, Moscow, and New York, but also Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, and—the terminal station—1990s London.

Indeed, Cool Britannia and the Young British Artists of the 1990s were key. In fact, while no one denies Serota's achievements, renowned art critics like Waldemar Januszczak maintain that the revolution was driven primarily by "off-stage events." In particular, the arrival of Charles Saatchi , the man in charge of the advertising campaign that turned Margaret Thatcher into the Iron Lady.

The opening of his private gallery in St. John's Wood in 1985 represented a real challenge for both the Tate group and the prevailing attitude of the time. "By investing in young talents like Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers , Saatchi did something Tate had never done before: he had blind faith in the new ," Januszczak explained in an article in The Sunday Times .

He asserts that when Hirst and his formalin-infused sharks began their journey from the back pages of newspapers to the front pages, they did so in opposition to everything the Tate represented at the time. In 1997, Saatchi's Sensation exhibition marked a turning point. "The opening of Tate Modern in 2000 was the icing on the cake , but it had nothing to do with the cooking," the expert says.

Be that as it may, Serota and Saatchi's artistic relationship ended in divorce . While Saatchi was banished to an anguished twilight, his enemy became the king of decisions and management of contemporary art.

Over the years, Tate Modern's greatest success has been the Turbine Hall , which, following Bourgeois's chandelier, prompted the annual commission for a giant new artwork. The enormous red PVC membrane stretched between three steel rings Anish Kapoor's work ; Olafur Eliasson's life-size indoor sunset with a mirrored ceiling; Doris Salcedo 's La Grieta, which literally tore through the gallery floor; and Ai Weiwei 's 100 million hand-painted porcelain "sunflower seeds" are some of the most iconic creations.

In 2016, the Tate Modern opened a new extension , adding 20,700 square meters—a 60% increase in space. The 65-meter structure has 10 floors, the top of which has a balcony offering a stunning 365-degree view, something that has led to several legal battles with residents of adjacent buildings, who feel their privacy has been violated.

With the extension, the Tate became the first museum in the world with a space dedicated solely to performance . In 2016, six adults emulated slowly walking, flesh-and-blood sculptures while emitting a whisper similar to that of meditating monks. Art? At the Tate, yes.

During its first quarter of a century, the Tate Modern has become part of the establishment without losing its appeal.

Since its first event, organized for London taxi drivers, the gallery's mission has been to make art accessible to all. Children draw on the floor, students have fun, families have picnics. It has also sought to expand its catalog, adding more international artists and women to its collection, alongside major exhibitions of Frida Kahlo , Georgia O'Keeffe , and Yayoi Kusama , the latter breaking attendance records in 2023. A retrospective of Tracey Emin —one of the very same Young British Artists of the 1990s —is planned for next year.

Compared to the National Gallery —which celebrated its 200th anniversary last year— the Tate Modern is a very young extra . It's true that, during the first quarter of this century, it has become part of the establishment without losing its appeal, something difficult to maintain. But the task of modern art is to evolve and challenge the status quo. And therein lies the challenge for its continuity.