Tate Britain's 'The 90s' Exhibition Draws Fire as All Scene, No Substance

Tate Britain's new exhibition "The 90s: Art and Fashion" has drawn a scathing verdict from critics: a show of atmosphere and nostalgia that fails its subject. The review, published by ARTnews, calls the exhibition "meaningless anti-intellectualism" and questions the museum's decision to hand a major show to a celebrity curator.

The exhibition is curated by Edward Enninful, most recently editor-in-chief of British Vogue. His credentials for this subject run deeper: he became fashion director of the magazine i-D at the age of 18 in 1990 and led it through the decade the show examines. Tate has never worked with a celebrity curator in this way before, and Enninful's presence is, in the critic's words, "strangely felt" throughout the galleries.

Whose voice runs the show?

A wedding gift Enninful received from Steve McQueen — a photograph of McQueen's hands — hangs on a wall. Numerous i-D spreads fill cases across the galleries, some containing photographs of Enninful himself. The show carries a striking focus on Black masculinity, the prism through which Enninful experienced the 1990s.

Yet the review finds his subjectivity never clearly articulated. Is it his voice speaking through the wall texts and object labels, or a neutral "museum" voice? Is Enninful the subject of the exhibition, present in the lives of the artists and models on display, or its curator? The critic, who identifies as a museum curator, argues the role "does, actually, require expertise" and that treating it as a celebrity hobby reflects a wider social phobia of experts.

What does the exhibition actually argue?

The critic catalogues contradictions at the show's core. Enninful frames the British 1990s as a decade of "critiquing commercialism" while also celebrating groundbreaking ad campaigns; a time of "challenging beauty standards" that simultaneously "democratized beauty." No point of distinction between fine art and visual culture is established. Fashion, commercial photography, personal photography and fine art share space without explanation — a choice that could have been critical, the review concedes, but instead reads as oversight.

The verdict on the works themselves is blunt: "Enninful seems to have gone out of his way to choose bad works." Helen Chadwick, described as a largely good artist, is represented by two of her weakest pieces. A cast of a hot water bottle representing a torso by Rachel Whiteread — small, quotidian, tactile, evoking absence and presence at once — ranks among the best things in the show, alongside Chris Ofili's 1998 painting "No Woman, No Cry."

Most of the rest — party snapshots, wallpaper covered in buttocks, many photographs of Kate Moss, fashion show videos, enlarged ad campaign stills — draws the judgment that "very little of it is good." The material conveys nostalgia for a heady era and makes a strong case for Enninful's relevance to it. But knowing everyone, the critic writes, does not make what he chose good art, or even art at all.

A missed decade

The critique cuts deepest on historical grounds. The 1990s were famously strong years for British art: the era of the YBAs, of a shifting sense of British identity, of optimism and progress. The decade fueled the founding of Tate Modern and Frieze London in the early 2000s and established London as a nexus of international artists and remarkable art spaces. The review's summation is stark: "You would not know that from this exhibition."

The broader worry concerns museums fighting for relevance in the attention economy. With this show, the critic argues, Tate situates itself alongside the celebrity economy of influence — a show supposedly celebrating the last "analog" decade that instead feels like surrender to the glibness of the digital age. "I don't think we should equate art with 'content'," the critic writes, concluding that Tate's capitulation to anti-intellectualism is "a grave shame." The verdict will fuel an ongoing debate over whether celebrity curation has a place in major museums.