Does Tate's Turbine choice make you tick?
I like to be mystified and that's why I like art. I know that if I went to the National Gallery every day I would still never fully understand Cézanne or Piero della Francesca, because when you encounter great art, knowledge becomes mere background information. Later this year, Tate Modern in London will show the extraordinary work of Mark Rothko - an artist you can also never explain or get to the end of. The Rothko room at Tate Modern is its greatest treasure, one of the supreme places on Earth to confront painting. I wish the museum's curators would take inspiration from it when they are next planning a commission for the Turbine Hall.
Today it was announced that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will be the ninth artist in the Unilever series. Once again you can see the commission ticking boxes.
Free from macho tendencies? Tick. French artist Gonzalez-Foerster makes melancholy films that passively observe city life. Her art is consciously slight and the character she adopts is that of the "flaneur", the artist as sophisticated urban observer, an idea invented by the 19th-century poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. In other words there is no chance of her filling the Turbine Hall with, say, a massive slab of steel. Her contribution will, like those previous classics the crack and the slides, reject grandiosity in favour of the witty and ephemeral. That's a relief - I was scared they might commission a colossal statue of George Bush. But then again Foerster is also ...
Free from north-American tendencies - another box ticked. Apart from Bruce Nauman who's a sort of honorary non-American, the Turbine Hall commissioners strikingly avoid inviting some rather obvious US candidates. It is precisely in the US that artists tend to work naturally, and brilliantly on this scale - but we have to wait a bit longer, it seems, to see a torqued steel creation by Richard Serra in Tate Modern, or a Jeff Koons inflated toy, or a Claes Oldenburg penknife. "Americanness" seems to be one of the vices the series strains to avoid, perhaps in the curators' minds being a synonym for masculine arrogance.
Free from bad taste - tick. The appeal of the slight, Baudelairean gesture, and the minimal aesthetic, is that it is remarkably tasteful. The kind of art that gets selected for Tate Modern is guaranteed not to make you feel daft or silly for liking it - for all its modernity this art has a decorous style. In other words, it will not give critics anything to mock or audiences anything to be embarrassed by.
In the 1960s the French artist Nikki de St Phalle created a giant recumbent woman for an art museum, with a door between her legs. You can guarantee you will never see that in the Turbine Hall. Nor will you see the bad taste genius of Damien Hirst on display here - that would be ... so vulgar.
So what is the highly popular Turbine Hall series all about? It is interesting that you can so easily define its rules negatively. I don't feel this is truly passionate or adventurous commissioning. All the artists invited to work in this prestigious space are established, known quantities. This means visitors can learn tenth hand about what's hot in the world of art while enjoying an apparently adventurous, but actually safe and cautious, dose of the 21st-century. Exclusions, negative preferences, restraint - these are not the stuff of great art but of middle of the road taste. The Turbine Hall commissions are nothing more or less than monuments to what it means to be middle class in modern Britain.
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