Late Night Pretentiousness

Going to galleries in the evening always seems a more enjoyable experience than heading there on the traditional Sunday afternoon. Many galleries now have late night openings and special events in the evenings, but one of the most enjoyable is at Tate Britain.

The Late at Tate nights occur on the first Friday of each month. The gallery stays open until ten and entry to all the special exhibitions is half price. They create a bar area in the main hall which is lit up beautifully with projections everywhere and a range of special events going on. This usually includes DJs, bands and various types of performance, usually of the cabaret variety. On 4th January, the website says: "In collaboration with International Project Space, Birmingham, expect an evening of performance and music, including interventions from !WOWOW!, the creative collective of artists, fashion designers, writers and musicians, and Chymical Wedding, a performance from the future-past-fiction guerrilla group Plastique Fantastique". Hmm.

Well we tried looking at !WOWOW!'s myspace site but it was, frankly, too hard to read (go there and you'll see what we mean). Also, and we don't mean to sound like grumpy old gits, but when somebody talks about "recreating the New York warehouse party scene" we tend to roll our eyes a little bit. Which isn't to say it won't be great-it's just that we've found many of the cabaret/musical acts which they've put on in the past to be piss poor. So keep expectations low and you won't be disappointed.

Meanwhile, the philosophy of this site is to be as unpretentious as possible. Which is a problem here, since we've always found the Late at Tate crowd to be pretentious as fuck. Never have we seen so many posers in one room together. To make matters worse, we're not overly keen on the Millais exhibition which is currently running. It's all very well presented and certainly provided an insight into how his painting changed as he grew older, but we couldn't get away from the fact that it was all a bit, well, boring. He just seemed like a rather opportunistic man, chasing the money of his sponsors by painting dull but technically brilliant portraits. We haven't seen the Turner Prize retrospective that's running there but it sounds either tremendously annoying or great fun, depending on how cynical you are.

The chance to get into these exhibitions for half price is certainly alluring but be warned that it does tend to get crowded in the paid exhibitions so if you want to see them slowly and without stress, it may be better to pay the full whack and come another time.

All the criticisms above don't really give a great impression of the night and it's true that we have our problems with both the logistics of the events and the seemingly random choice of bands and theatre collectives whom they put on. However, we've always had a good time when we've gone. The permanent collections are as impressive as always and the atmosphere in the hall/ bar area, though pretentious, is at least lively and a change from the normal gallery visit experience. Also, you get a strange feeling from watching a band play in a room surrounded by invaluable works of art. An odd experience then, but probably worth trying once and don't blame us if you get trampled on and want to strangle the entertainment.