Art Wank

Nick Serota hedges his bets on the election

Interestingly, the commitment to Tate Modern was made not by the Labour government but by a Conservative government, in 1995, when Virginia Bottomley supported the creation of Tate Modern. So Tate Modern has, in a sense, been a crossparty invention.

• Nicholas Serota in interview, ‘Artists, critics and readers on 10 years of Tate Modern’, The Observer, 25 April 2010, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/25/serota-tate-modern-tenth-birthday>

AW: A genius of diplomacy. Whoever is elected on 6 May, you just know Nick will be badgering them for money by the 7th.

Boris Johnson on the Tate Modern extension

[Boris Johnson explained how Tate are going to take the Bankside power station and] “shove onto it an incredible space-age Isaac Asimov trapezoid thing”

• ‘Boris Johnson officially begins the Tate Modern extension: “an incredible space-age Isaac Asimov trapezoid thing”’, Art Review, 6 January 2010, <http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A978265>