Once it was a center for the collection, study, care, and exhibition of fine art—but not any more, protests Perl, art editor of the New Republic. Today, the modern art museum—as exemplified by London’s gigantic new Tate Modern—has become "a funhouse," in which great painting and sculpture of the last 100 years take a back seat to moving images, electronic noise, "wrap-around drama," and the museum building itself.

At Tate Modern, which opened in May in a vast transformed industrial building on the south bank of the Thames, Perl writes, "there are three enormous floors of exhibition space, containing some 80 galleries, but only enough classic modern work to fill three or four rooms." To disguise the paucity, "the curators have reached for themes that enable them to bulk up their classic holdings with humungous recent works, or else contextualized the random masterpiece until it seems less a work of art than an illustration in a history book." Though chronology is "the backbone of the historical sense," the galleries are not arranged chronologically, but according to dubious, ill-fitting categories, such as "Still Life/Real Life/Object." The museum’s whole mentality, Perl complains, "seems far more keyed to movies or popular entertainment than to painting or sculpture of the past hundred years."

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