LONDON
THE vast brick-faced power plant standing across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral still seems like an implausible home for a major museum, but that no longer worries Londoners. In the five years since Tate Modern opened, it has become a phenomenon: social, economic, urban, even artistic. And here, it seems, success counts more than appearance.
True, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron did an imaginative job converting the monolithic building. They left its 350-foot-high chimney, raised the "skirt" of its facade at ground level and added a new glass-fronted top floor. Inside, they created three floors of exhibition space and left its cavernous Turbine Hall as a challenge to artists and curators.
But the real alchemy occurred when the people arrived. From its first days, Tate Modern drew crowds, devoted as much to discovering London's first modern-art museum as to hanging out in its large bookstore, its cafes and its top-floor restaurant overlooking the river. Indeed, helped by free admission (except for temporary shows), it has become a genuine public space.
Little wonder, then, that for its fifth birthday, Tate Modern is blowing its own trumpet. Since May 2000, it boasts, it has received close to 22 million visitors. And between April 2004 and March 2005, the number was 4.15 million, surpassing, for instance, the 3.6 million visitors to the Pompidou Center in Paris during the same period. (It is too early to make a similar comparison to the "new" Museum of Modern Art in New York.) In 2004, 60 percent of Tate Modern's visitors were under 35, and 40 percent were repeat visitors.
So, yes, Sir Nicholas Serota, 59, the Tate's director since 1988 and the man who took the gamble of creating Tate Modern and dividing the Tate's collection into post-1900 international art and British art, has reason to feel vindicated.
Certainly, not everyone has been won over; not Matthew Collings, an independent art critic, who says that hip has become hype. As he recently told BBC Radio, "that the relationship of that museum to art is one of solemn pretentiousness coupled with a sort of inane silliness."
But to those who say people visit the museum mainly to socialize, Sir Nicholas can now afford a dry retort: "It's a kind of myth that, in the 1950's and 1960's, people came to museums only to look at art and now they come only to drink coffee."
The museum's timing was impeccable. From the early 1990's, thanks to the mischievous antics of the so-called Young British Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and the marketing skills of the collector Charles Saatchi, contemporary art became all the rage here. Even tabloid ridicule of the annual Turner Prize - is this art? - kept it in the news. And then Tate Modern appeared, wrapping new art in respectability.
Yet for all its popularity, Tate Modern is still a work in progress, starting with the building itself. "It always takes time for any institution to learn to manipulate the instrument it has created, and it has taken us time, and I think we haven't quite got hold of the building," Sir Nicholas said over coffee in his office in the old Tate Gallery near Westminster, now the Tate Britain. "Some things have worked well. Turbine Hall has been a startling success. But the layout of the galleries can create the sense that you are on a conveyor belt."
One solution is a new extension planned for the south side of the building, he said, to cost an estimated $300 million. Here, he went on, galleries would be designed more as destination spaces than as corridors, not least because they would be displaying less traditional art forms - installations, architecture, video and film - a diversification that, perchance, mirrors the broad mission of the Pompidou Center.
Yet what has really prompted the Tate's trustees to invite the firm of Herzog & de Meuron to design the new extension is, again, success. Sir Nicholas said he had originally imagined a need to seek new space around 2010, but the museum's large crowds - averaging 11,200 a day - made it necessary sooner. Further, the French utilities company Électricité de France Energy, which still occupies part of the building, is planning to upgrade its equipment and will soon be freeing new areas.
But there is another reason. Even more than Shakespeare's Globe Theater, which opened 100 yards away in 1997, Tate Modern has energized this long-neglected Southwark neighborhood. Art galleries and restaurants have sprung up, buildings are being renovated, and new ones are appearing. Nearby, for instance, the Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid is building a new exhibition center for Britain's Architecture Foundation, her first project in London.
"We also have to develop a plan because our neighbors are beginning to come forward with plans for major office and residential buildings and, if all those are completed, they would probably restrict what we could do in the long term," Sir Nicholas said. "We have to tell Southwark what we're planning to do - and we're going to do so this year."
As it happens, the threat of unwanted neighbors is real. A development group has acquired a small property barely 30 yards from the ramp leading down to Turbine Hall, where it plans to build a high-rise that would soar above Tate Modern. Attempts by local residents - and by the Tate - to block the project have so far failed, but a residents' association has now taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Still, for all the talk of real estate, what about the art? Sir Nicholas has long tired of conceding that Tate Modern's early-20th-century collection is weak, especially compared with the Modern's in New York and the Pompidou's in Paris. "We obviously can't fill these holes other than by a gift from an individual collection," he explained, "and in this country, at least, there are not big collectors. What we can do, however, is to try to acquire major works from the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Of course the market pushes up prices, particularly in the United States, but there are opportunities."
The Tate empire as a whole - Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives - has only about $8 million to spend each year on new acquisitions. Sir Nicholas has therefore looked for donations by leading British artists. So far, with pledges from 30 artists, 8 works have been delivered.
In the meantime, Tate Modern will rotate art from its permanent collection every six years, with the first new display scheduled for next year.
Vicente Todoli, the museum's director, said somewhat murkily: "It will be neither thematic nor chronological, although in some areas the public will sense time, and other areas may suggest themes. It will have a lot do with movements of art, confrontations, hubs, cross-sections. But it will start from the strengths of the collection, not from an idea."
When it comes to temporary exhibitions, Tate Modern has an advantage. It naturally counts on blockbusters to fill its cash box, and it is looking to its new Frida Kahlo retrospective, which was to open on June 9, to pull in the crowds. But with smaller shows, it is also introducing the art of non-Britons like Giorgio Morandi, Sigmar Polke, Luc Tuymans and Arte Povera artists, to the public here.
That these shows are also popular is a measure of the remarkable awakening to modern and contemporary art in Britain today. And in promoting this interest, Tate Modern is accompanied by the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts (which presented the infamous 1997 "Sensation!" show by Young British Artists from Mr. Saatchi's collection). But Tate Modern is the proof that modern art has come here to stay.
"The success of Tate Modern has been so complete and so far-reaching that it takes an effort to remember a time when it did not exist," Richard Dorment, the respected art critic of The Daily Telegraph of London, wrote in his anniversary tribute. "Today, London is acknowledged to be the center of the art world, a role that once belonged to Paris and then New York."
So, Sir Nicholas was asked, did he now intend to follow the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Pompidou in expanding his empire abroad?
"The empire is built," he replied with a smile.
He sounded convincing. More or less.
