It’s not the Tate’s job to heal you
There must be limits to the idea of art as restorative
This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Recently, I have been wandering the corridors of an NHS hospital to visit a sick family member. On the polar-white walls hang artworks that add a colourful sprinkle to that stark place.
It is easy to see how art provides respite in such an environment. The Paintings in Hospitals scheme, founded in 1959 and continually supported by Arts Council England, loans artworks from its permanent collection to healthcare institutions. In this there is a distant echo of a medieval approach to therapy in which woodcut illustrations, sculptures and frescoes reassured patients in monasteries and convents of the divine nature of their care.
The link between visual art and its health benefits is well documented. Researchers at King’s College London found last year that viewing artworks in a gallery setting had a positive physiological impact on the body. Art has the capacity to excite and engage us when we visit dedicated art spaces. At the very least, placing artworks in hospitals and clinics enlivens soulless environments. Unfortunately, it is now the arts sector’s fate to be plagued by the importation of healthcare responsibilities into public cultural institutions.
These cultural institutions are transforming curatorial practice in order to combat the spread of anxiety and depression — particularly amongst the young. Taxpayer value is proven through demonstrable worth. Curators are incentivised to diagnose and treat societal ailments through exhibition practices as a means of demonstrating their social utility and thereby justifying their public funding, at the expense of art’s true potential to cultivate society.
Care has always been a core principle of gallery practice and a primary reason for the emergence of public galleries across 18th century Britain. The Act of Parliament that established the British Museum in 1753 justified the public acquisition of the Cottonian Library which was “in Danger of perishing for Want of due Care” because the original storage was “damp and improper for preserving the Books and Papers”. The word “curator” derives from “curare” or “to care”, reflecting its ecclesiastical roots, where clergy members were responsible for caring for the community. The curatorial profession developed to preserve items of national importance for future generations. Collection care remains a key tenet of public institutions. One of the Tate’s main responsibilities is to “care for, preserve and add to the works of art and the documents in their collections”.
Furthermore, such arguments are central to debates about restitution. Custodianship is a common argument used by British Museum representatives to justify retaining the Elgin Marbles. Professional standards guarantee proper care for invaluable artworks. Institutions such as the Hamilton Kerr at Cambridge University and the Courtauld welcome a select group of students each year to train in the arduous profession of conservation.
Rigorous training programmes in delivering proper care help prevent botched restoration work, thereby clearly fulfilling and justifying one of the primary original aims of public museums. By such professional training do we avoid ending up with another “Monkey Christ” fresco of Jesus like that produced by the late amateur painter Cecilia Giménez Zueco at the Sanctuary of Mercy church near Zaragoza.
In a roundabout way, it is understandable that caring for collections benefits the public, who can access the artefacts for generations to come. However, since the 1990s — and particularly since the Blair government — efforts to show value have led to care responsibilities in public galleries becoming increasingly audience-focused. It is as if curators are now expected to follow the Hippocratic Oath to perform the role of societal caregivers.
Britain’s public art galleries used to care for their community in a subtler, paternalistic manner. Regional galleries emerged as civic centres during the Victorian age to introduce urban working-class populations to beautiful art, provide artistic education and instil civic pride. In contrast, an ethics of care rooted in the current obsession with vulnerability has emerged.
Like many other words that have been “problematised” using post-structural approaches in the humanities, “care” is no longer simply a benign building block of a sentence, but is now part of a broader academic nexus that underpins its public expression. Theories of care have been imported into the humanities to challenge Western capitalist and patriarchal society, which is believed to be characterised by autonomy and independence.
Platforming under-represented artists is one way to demonstrate to public funding bodies that your institution cares. The Tate Vision, for instance, states the commitment that “recent acquisitions have focused the need for Tate to embrace artists who — coming from different histories and backgrounds — often fall outside mainstream gallery representation”.
In contrast to this directed cultivation, the artist Grayson Perry sparked controversy at the height of the Covid pandemic by predicting that the virus’s economic consequences could clear “a bit of dead wood” from the arts. In other words, the market would determine which artists were genuinely popular enough with the public to survive, rather than relying on the financial support of unknown or unpopular artists curated by out-of-touch individuals.
Under-representation has been treated as an illness to be remedied through public promotion. One manifestation of the medicalisation of artistic value is the latest Turner Prize winner. Commentators — including chair of the jury and director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson — focused excessively on the fact that Nnena Kalu was the first learning-disabled artist to win the prize, rather than on discussing the artistic qualities of her work.
Not only are curators expected to address complex manifestations of medical disabilities, but also to inextricably link care and climate change. One wall text at Tate Britain declares, “We continue to struggle with the planet-wide impact of the climate emergency.” Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has an installation by the indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara that neatly ticks the Tate’s goal of addressing the “climate emergency”. Reindeer hides and bones are arranged to encourage reflection on the destruction of ecosystems.
The installation reflects a self-conscious awareness about institutional guilt. Although Henry Tate’s company post-dated the abolition of slavery, a tenuous connection can be stretched to sugar cultivation’s pre-Tate dependence on slave labour by those motivated to find fault in the gallery founder’s philanthropy. Also, Tate Modern is housed in a former oil and coal power station. In other words, the prognosis is terminal, but the installation offers surface-level respite by promoting the belief that institutions should be environmentally sustainable and demonstrate how artworks should tackle this theme.
Unlike professions such as law and accountancy, there are no qualifications through which curators can demonstrate their suitability for hugely oversubscribed job opportunities. In this context, the sick patient will desperately search for a cure. Language associated with the Turner Prize winner and the repetition of unsubtle terms — such as “Emergency” — directly maps onto the healthcare system, evoking a model in which diagnosis and treatment deserve taxpayer funding. The result is an art world equivalent of emergency rooms, staffed by unqualified doctors tasked with treating misdiagnosed patients.
The effect of this model is that the stakes are constantly raised. Like the NHS, public museums and galleries are understaffed. Curators face a multitude of tasks that require flexible working patterns and skills, often covering several roles at once and struggling on fixed-term or temporary contracts. It’s understandable that activist approaches to demonstrate utility might be regarded as evidence of efficiency.
However, whatever the route into the field, curators are not qualified to serve as caregivers or psychiatrists, and raising such issues without the resources or knowledge of the consequences should trigger alarm bells — that is, if we are to take the sources of anxiety as seriously as so proclaimed. Whilst addressing themes such as gender identity, immigration and post-colonialism is labelled as progress, it is difficult to measure whether the potential response of being “triggered” is enough on its own to improve visitors’ wellbeing.
Fortunately, the tide is turning. Whereas the past couple of years have seen the dominance of political themes at the Tate, exhibition programmes for the year ahead are banking on the blockbuster model, a move they will need to take, given that the Tate Modern and Tate Britain’s visitor numbers have dropped by more than a quarter since 2019. Upcoming months will feature solo shows of artists such as Tracey Emin, Frida Kahlo and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham across the Tate museums alone. The U-turn toward blockbuster exhibitions suggests reliance on the supposedly unforgiving market is necessary.
Western conservative critics have already fought against the notion of uncaring capitalism by demonstrating how economic improvement benefits society over time. However, whether to trust the invisible hand of the market or not is irrelevant to the purpose of art galleries. Governance and curators of these major institutions — ones that set the precedent for the art world at large — are realising that claiming to care about issues isn’t, in itself, enough. Visitors want to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery, rather than receive unwarranted diagnoses of cultural malaise. Curators must set aside perceived public caregiving duties to focus on the artworks, confident that visitors can look after themselves.
