Francesca Piovano

INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA

F. PIOVANO
TATE MODERN GALLERY
Facts and reflections based on an interview with the director Vicente Todoli

№3 2004 (04)

Modern and contemporary art have become more popular than ever that’s a fact. Audiences have increased so much that museums are now part of a kind of mass tourism, something that twenty years ago would have been unthinkable. It all started with the so called ‘blockbuster shows’. One of the first was the Tutankhamen exhibition in New York many years ago, followed by shows such as the Van Gogh, Picasso and many others. Nowadays exhibitions have to be marketed in a similar way as any other entertainment industry, like cinema or theatre for example. As state funding has generally speaking decreased, new museums depend more and more on outside funding and on revenue from tickets. That means that they have to go out into the world and employ the same tactics used by the commercial advertisement.