At the dawn of the 1990s, Britain was not viewed as a global leader in contemporary art. Yet, by the turn of the millennium, the nation had become synonymous with a new, provocative artistic wave that often felt brash, vulgar, and macabre, while simultaneously demonstrating unexpected emotional depth and intelligence. A major retrospective revisiting this transformative era at Tate Britain, which famously hosted the Turner Prize during those years of headline-grabbing controversies, should be a significant event. Instead, the current exhibition feels remarkably hollow. Staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing, you’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role.
Guest-curated by former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, the show prioritizes personal aesthetic fantasy over historical weight, leaning heavily into fashion at the expense of its artistic subjects. While figures like Isabella Blow are prominent, artists such as Rachel Whiteread are relegated to minor inclusions. Damien Hirst’s contribution is similarly diminished; his small, muted shark works fail to convey the visceral, death-obsessed impact of his earlier career. Whether these works still possess their original power or have aged into irrelevance is difficult to gauge here, as there simply is not enough representative material provided to form a judgment.
The exhibition structure suffers from what appears to be a magazine-style approach. By presenting conceptual art alongside high-fashion photography in a breathless, glamorous sequence, the curators inadvertently undermine both. The art is reduced to a lifestyle accessory, while the fashion images, when placed in this context, often appear vacant. For instance, Juergen Teller’s 1996 photograph of Kristen McMenamy, marked with a heart and the word “Versace,” functions primarily as a brand advertisement, clashing sharply with the artistic alienation seen in nearby works like Sarah Lucas’s 1997 piece, Chicken Knickers. Its design has the breathless superficiality of a glossy layout bigging up its glib theme, in this case “The 90s”, in a glamorous sweep of strikingly juxtaposed images, not only are there style mags in the show. Juergen Teller’s 1996 photograph Kristen McMenamy No 3 is hung next to Sarah Lucas’s 1997 work Chicken Knickers.
Some moments of genuine overlap occur, such as Gary Hume’s painting of Kate Moss, which offers a cynical, pop-art commentary on celebrity culture that surpasses the nearby fashion portraits. However, the exhibition largely ignores the wider pop-cultural explosion of the decade. The club scene is captured in party snapshots, but the show conspicuously avoids the broader British pop revival of the era, omitting any reference to bands like Oasis or Blur. A show that spectacularly revisited fin-de-siecle British art would be an interesting proposition.
The “body horror” section is particularly fraught, dominated by Alexander McQueen’s theatrical costumes, which some critics argue lean more toward pretension than artistic expression. Placed against the backdrop of cold, fashion-focused photography, the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman provide a rare moment of depth. Their sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead, remains a harrowing exploration of war, pain, and morality, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding glitz. Sadly, other influential artists, including Helen Chadwick, Chris Ofili, and Tracey Emin, are relegated to tokenistic or isolated representations, while others like Jeremy Deller and Mat Collishaw are omitted entirely. Based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree, their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead. The representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose, it asks questions about war and art.
With only seven rooms in total, the experience is abruptly short, leaving visitors with the same sense of dissatisfaction one might feel after idling through an aged copy of The Face magazine in a waiting room. The exhibition treats the movement as a superficial trend, failing to afford these significant works the space or nuance required to be properly evaluated. Even for those skeptical of the artistic merit of the period, the dismissal of such a pivotal cultural moment feels like a missed opportunity for a serious retrospective.
