Artitecture

As a themed business enterprise, Tate Modern isn’t all that remote from Vegas. Like any self-respecting new museum, it boasts a rooftop restaurant (with a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral), a number of bars and cafés, and an enormous store stretching across two levels. In addition to maintaining another shop in a London department store, the Tate recently announced a joint for-profit Internet venture with the Museum of Modern Art, appealing to customers who want to “access, understand and purchase the best in modern art, design and culture,” as a press release declared.

Finally, like the Guggenheim with its satellites in Bilbao and Berlin, the Tate is an expanding franchise, with smaller but significant venues already in place in Liverpool and Cornwall. Its influence stretches beyond the realm of art. And why shouldn’t it? If Gehry’s Bilbao museum could transform a little-known center of Basque terrorism and industrial decline into an international cultural landmark, presumably Tate Modern can aspire to be the new face of 21st-century London. Locally, it has already functioned as a power plant of economic growth, spurring real estate development throughout its lower-income neighborhood of Southwark.

The museum’s reinvention as a contemporary mass medium has its downside, of course. The stadium-rock approach to exhibition making is severely limited: A great deal of art, after all, is still designed to be seen by relatively small groups of people at a time, and works that require sustained contemplation don’t lend themselves to the conveyer-belt traffic flows enforced by blockbuster shows.

But as a mass medium, the museum building has distinct advantages. Far more effectively than a work of art, it can serve as a key icon of a city’s identity, a public symbol of shared values, or it can even suggest, like the architectural counterpart of a novel, a provocative world-view. And for a society that prizes packaging over content, it is the ideal cultural totem.

Tate Modern wants to be all of these things — to be far more, in other words, than the sum of its parts. Its awe-inspiring building succeeds beautifully, but it also leaves you wondering at what cost, and whether art can thrive under the big top if it’s no longer the main attraction.