Tents In The Tate

Lindsey
By Lindsey Last edited 202 months ago
Tents In The Tate
tate.jpg

First slides, now colouring in and camping. Tate believes the children are art's future. They’re going to teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside...

Sorry, but we all need a Whitney moment once in a while.

Today, 150 young people will receive an invitation to attend a day of workshops at Bankside culminating in a mass sleepover in the Turbine Hall. This is part of a high profile consultation with ‘da kidz’ about diversifying its artgoing demographic and developing plans for the funky, new, and rather expensive extension.

The kids will get to decorate their own tents, inspired by the Tate collection. As night draws in there will be late-night workshops and films which will doubtless be ignored in favour of staying up all night giggling, bluetoothing, telling spooky stories and being too scared to go to the loo.

But that’s not all. Over the next year and with an online presence as well as a series of short films on Channel 4, the consultation will build up to a conference, designed and led by young people, in Autumn 2008, ingeniously titled “From My Space To Your Space” (geddit?). The results of this exercise will be grandly published as the first ever young people’s “Creative Manifesto” for Britain.

It all sounds wonderfully outreachy, inclusive, participatory and grassrootsy to us but then, with arts funding so brutally cut for 2008-11, we suspect it's portentously indicative of how all arts organisations are going to have to make efforts to publicly double tick every Arts Council box if they’re going to survive the dry spell.

Image of the slide queues earlier this year courtesy of Orhan in the Londonist Flickr pool.

Last Updated 29 May 2007