Tate Modern: Pushing the limits of regeneration

This paper questions the conventional limits of regeneration and highlights the limited range of approaches, especially in relation to cultural institutions and their multiplicity of audiences, and the fact that different policies evoke, or construct, various 'publics', 'visitors' and 'audiences'. The question of who gains and looses is given an extra twist when the object or instrument of regeneration is a cultural institution: a gallery or museum. To this end we identify the manifest tensions between the instrumentalisation of museums and galleries, and the potential to undermine their core purpose. We draw upon a second literature of museology to provide contrasting notions of audience and inclusion since such analyses sensitize the debate regarding audience and regeneration and will illustrate these issues by reference to Tate Modern in London.

Research highlights► Questions the conventional limits to regeneration. ► Identifies the manifest tensions between the instrumentalisation of museums and galleries, and the potential to undermine their core purpose. ► Argues that evaluation cannot be reduced to uni-dimensional bottom line in a multi-causal environment. Both, the role of institutional changes changing the conditions of museum priorities and processes; and redefining who their audience(s) might be; and, how different representational or curatorial practices can, likewise, re-configure who and what, as well as where the audience is. ► Provides an example of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall that challenges the passive notion of audience that regeneration, and social inclusion, implies. ► Illustrates the benefits of attempting to 'think together' two quite different literatures on audience and representation: of normative regeneration and museology and shows how the literature on museology and its concepts of audience offer some pointers toward a reformed vision of what and who is being regenerated.