“Some of my best friends are figurative painters”
Praised for his visionary revitalisation of the national collection but scorned for his perceived love-affair with conceptualism, few in the art world divide opinion like Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota. As he signs a new, permanent contract with the gallery Patrick Kingsley meets the most influential figure in British art.
Nicholas Serota has enemies. You wouldn't know it from his kindly demeanour, his tidy shirtsleeves and from the way he revitalised both the Tate and the Whitechapel Galleries, but someone somewhere has always taken issue with something he's done.
As a member of the Young Tate, he enraged the powers-that-were with his independent outreach projects and unofficial exhibitions. A decade later, as the new Director of the Whitechapel, commentators criticised his year-long closure of the gallery whilst others condemned the avant-garde content of his exhibitions. Many traditionalists resented his eventual appointment as Tate director, still more hated the plans to install Tate Modern inside an old power-station and, of late, the
Stuckists - a collection of figuratively-minded artists - have mounted a fierce campaign to remove him office.
Nothing, however, more riled his opponents than his decision to buy several pieces of work from current Tate Artist Trustees. Most notably, his 2005 acquisition of trustee Chris Ofili's The Upper Room sparked a huge controversy. The Charity Commission deemed it illegal; the Daily Telegraph called the debacle "one of the most serious indictments of [a national cultural institution] in living memory"; and the Stuckists implied he was guilty of cronyism. Their leader, Charles Thomson, alleged that "Serota, as the director, chooses the trustees, and the trustees are then responsible for reappointing the director. The director then buys the trustees' work... Basically the Tate are appointing their own bosses."
Serota himself vigorously denies this version of events: "Firstly, I don't choose the trustees. The trustees are appointed by the PM on the recommendation of a panel of [other] Tate trustees together with an
independent assessor. I don't have any part to play in their appointment." Moreover, he argues, it isn't as if these Trustees had anything to gain by selling to the Tate. "Why would I want to win their support? These are artists who have a place in the world already; people are falling over themselves to buy Chris Ofili's work and Peter Doig's work. The issue is not, ‘Is the Tate is doing this to curry favour with them?' but, actually, ‘Can the Tate get hold of the work?'" Most convincingly, he points out that, in fact, "Chris Ofili sold us The Upper Room at a price way below what he could have achieved elsewhere... Many works by Ofili had sold for higher prices at auction."
Which all sounds perfectly reasonable. Yet the fact remains that the Tate, however well-intentioned, broke charity law not just in Ofili's case but in sixteen other instances too. Who was to blame? Serota is quick to lay responsibility on age-old institutional malpractice: "we had been following a practice which had been running for fifty years." He is keen - almost defensively so - to stress that Tate practice has improved