12 hours ago
9
Tate Britain’s visitor numbers continue to rise year on year, and Tate Modern is the most visited museum of modern art in the world. Over 6 million people visited a Tate gallery in 2024. Your report (Tate director blames Brexit and Covid for slump in visitors, 29 July) compares our latest attendance figures for Tate Modern and Tate Britain against the most visited year in their history, 2019, when they had 700,000 more visitors than the year before. It would be fairer to compare with an average of annual attendances before Covid.
As your article notes, the number of UK visitors to Tate’s galleries has returned to 95% of pre-pandemic levels. Attendances at paid-for exhibitions at both Tate Modern and Tate Britain are also back up to pre-Covid levels. Almost all of the remaining shortfall is in international tourists’ visits to the free collections. However, a further 1 million people engaged with Tate works in exhibitions worldwide. While demographic changes in European visitation have had an impact, our success with local audiences, the achievement that your article notes of 76,000 visitors to Tate Modern’s Birthday Weekend (70% of whom were under 35), and our upcoming programme of Pablo Picasso, JMW Turner, John Constable and Tracey Emin, have given us a stronger platform than ever for future growth.
Maria Balshaw
Director, Tate
I would have to agree with those who blame Tate’s woes on things other than Brexit and Covid. Since the heady years of the noughties and teens, it seems that the Tate has failed to really capture the imagination with its exhibitions offer. Where are the shows of the magnitude of Cruel Tender that shed new light on what a photograph could be and do? Nor has there been anything to match the gutsiness of the Mona Hatoum retrospective, the delight of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, the immersiveness of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project or the political cogency of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds.
Apart from the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye portrait show at Tate Britain and the El Anatsui pieces in the Turbine Hall, there has been little, in terms of contemporary art, to set the pulse racing of late. It doesn’t help that the Turner prize – once a focus of national conversation – is now so low-key as to barely warrant a mention in the press. Maybe contemporary art has run out of energy, but surely in the current era we need a vibrant art and public gallery scene to engage us in discussion of pressing issues.
Catherine Bliss
Tonbridge, Kent
