Tate Britain's 'The 90s' Splits Critics: One Star or Five?

Tate Britain opened "The 90s: Art and Fashion" to the public on Wednesday, one day after Donatella Versace, Givenchy's Sarah Burton, Burberry's Daniel Lee, photographer Ellen von Unwerth and British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan joined the opening-night crowd in London. British critics have already split sharply over the show: one star from the Guardian, five stars from the Daily Telegraph.

Co-curated by former British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful — who led the Condé Nast title from 2017 to 2024 — with Tate Britain curators Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Alex Farquharson and Celeste McEvoy, the exhibition examines how 1990s art and fashion fed off one another in Britain.

What did the critics say?

The Times of London's chief art critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote: "I expected a celebration of the Nineties — instead it was a fashion disaster."

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones went further, giving the show one out of five stars. "This isn't an exhibition, it's a magazine spread," he wrote, adding: "You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of The Face in a dentist's waiting room."

The Telegraph's Alastair Sooke disagreed entirely, awarding five stars and writing that the show left him "buzzing." The Independent's Stephen Armstrong, also at five stars, remarked that "the hope on the walls of this five-star exhibition is heartbreaking."

Part of the backlash stems from the marketing: posters of Kate Moss photographed by Juergen Teller plastered the city before the opening, and praise for the exhibition has gone largely to Enninful rather than the art.

What is the show actually about?

Vaughan, speaking as the exhibition opened, described the decade as "this huge moment of growth and creativity, a time which really defined the parameters of what we now consider contemporary art." She said the show is about "how they were feeding off one another and how the thematics were parallels in the things that these young creatives were interested in."

The curators' stated goal is to spotlight British artists beyond the Young British Artists, who were predominantly white. "The story of the YBAs is really well-known and some of the criticism we've got so far is that we haven't included those big names enough," Vaughan said. "There are works by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst there. We just wanted to spotlight other artists who we didn't think got their dues and Edward always did that in fashion."

Those boldface names are paired with artists rarely grouped with the YBAs, including Hamad Butt, Eileen Perrier, Yinka Shonibare and Barbara Walker.

Which works carry the show?

Several key works tackle queer themes that were largely not historicized alongside the YBAs, whose art often privileged provocation. Butt's Familiars (1992), a three-part sculptural installation in the Tate's collection, consists of vacuum-sealed glass bulbs containing toxic chemicals; viewers are invited to engage with the sculpture at the risk of cracking a bulb and releasing the chemicals — a comment on homophobia and contagion during the AIDS crisis. When Familiars last showed at the Tate in the '90s, one vial did crack and the gallery was evacuated. "It's the idea that the thing that we're most attracted to might be the thing that's the most threatening to us and the work has a mythology around it," Vaughan said.

Another centerpiece is Steve McQueen's 1993 film Bear, depicting two Black men wrestling — simultaneously affectionate and combative, dripping with homoerotism. Vaughan argues that even artists as famous as McQueen are rarely featured in the same context as Hirst and Emin.

A second thread addresses female artists and the experience of inhabiting a female body. Sam Taylor-Johnson's Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank (1993) shows the artist in a T-shirt printed with those four words, her white denim jeans around her ankles; the museum has recreated the shirt for the gift shop. Nearby hangs Sarah Lucas's iconic Chicken Knickers (1997), a raw whole chicken affixed to the front of a woman's underwear. "We wanted to capture what it was to be a young woman at that time and to counter the images of Kate Moss by Corinne Day and others," Vaughan said.

Why does it resonate now?

The show speaks to London's present. With the UK facing an upsurge in right-wing politics — in September, cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo donated £36 million to Reform UK, the biggest single donation a British political party has received — the room on life post-Margaret Thatcher, featuring disused urban spaces and photography by Day and Teller, feels prescient. And with more than a quarter of London's late-night venues closing between 2020 and 2025, the gallery devoted to '90s nightlife, from queer parties to drum and bass to acid house, carries real poignancy.

Whether the harshest critics caught it or not, the exhibition's wager is that a reevaluation of the '90s might offer something for the present.