As Tate Liverpool reviews practices and sheds staff, is it being dumped in favour of the more southerly parts of the Tate empire?
What is the trouble at Tate Liverpool? The Merseyside branch of the Tate has had a run of high-impact successes including its current René Magritte exhibition. Or were they successes at all? The apparently thriving gallery announced this week that it is to shed staff in a comprehensive review of the way it is run. Meanwhile, director Christoph Grunenberg is leaving for a new job in Bremen.
In the Liverpool and national press, the news has been received with bland acceptance. But it begs a couple of questions. Only one of two scenarios makes sense of this situation: either Tate Liverpool has been run very badly and got itself into a mess of its own making, or it is being – to put it bluntly – dumped on to protect more favoured parts of the Tate empire. Note: every other Tate museum is in the south.
Either way this is disturbing. Tate Liverpool, remember, was not founded out of pure cultural idealism. It was created to help regenerate Liverpool and the northwest. In the 1980s Conservative minister Michael Heseltine made it a personal priority to restore economic life to the city of Boys from the Blackstuff and Militant. The birth of Tate Liverpool in part of the reclaimed Albert Dock (where Atlantic shipping including slave ships once made the city rich) was part of this initiative. With its reuse of an old industrial building, it set the pattern for more recent cultural ventures including Tate Modern. Liverpool has come a long way since its economic tragedy of the 80s – but not far enough for Tate Liverpool to be irrelevant to its future.
In the northwest, public-funded service sector institutions such as Tate Liverpool are critical. I love art. But to be honest, I think Merseyside needs jobs and stimulus more than it needs lovely exhibitions for their own sake. If the social purpose of Tate Liverpool is lost, if it can't play its part in enriching a historically troubled part of the UK, what is the point of it?
This is, at best, a worrying reflection of the drift in cultural as well as economic wealth from north to south. In the New Labour era, public arts ventures helped to spread the assets of Britain throughout our regions. City centres prospered, even if it was a different story away from the high street. Now high streets are shrinking and so is the illusion of a just balance of north and south. The changes at Tate Liverpool seem to reflect these times when not even the pretence of geographical redistribution is being maintained. As the north shrinks, so does one of its most important public galleries. Why is Tate letting Liverpool down?