There is an anecdote that Sir Nicholas Serota told in a lecture he gave in November 2000, almost exactly six months after the triumphant opening, in the gargantuan chambers of the Bankside power station in London, of Tate Modern. It concerned a civil service inquiry into the salary of the director of the Tate Gallery conducted in 1987, the year before Serota took up the post. The director’s pay, it was concluded, ought to be raised to match that of the directors of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery. Not because the Tate was intrinsically as important as these venerable institutions, but rather because “the director of the Tate has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art”. The Tate director, in short, was due danger money for having to cope with the inexplicable, the unpopular, the controversial and the bewildering.  Serota's proposition that art made today might have something important or enriching to say to us has won out  It would be difficult, now, for even the most out-of-touch Whitehall mandarin to argue that modern art was “a very difficult problem” in British culture. Though many would argue that Britain’s relationship with contemporary culture remains unevolved compared with that of its European neighbours, there has been a vast and (it feels) irreversible change over the past 30 years. Contemporary art is no longer an embarrassment. It is completely mainstream. Serota’s simple proposition that the art being made today might have something important, enriching, surprising, disturbing, or joyful to say to us, has won out.  Politicians talk, unabashed, about the importance of Tate Modern and Frieze art fair. London has a contemporary-art economy that supports hundreds of commercial galleries and thousands of artists. Towns that could not have dreamed of supporting a modern art gallery in 1987 – from Gateshead and Wakefield to Margate and Middlesbrough – now do so. Parts of the press still, it is true, make hay with the annual Turner prize shortlist, finding controversy where they can. But perhaps, now, with a tone more of sport and playfulness than loathing. Not all of this transformation is down to the single figure of Serota. But a lot of it is.  He is an old-fashioned public servant: he believes in culture as a civic right, art a precious resource held in common  Serota is a man who can often seem forbidding, with his poker-straight backbone, firmly clenched jaw and penetrating gaze. He is, of course, ambitious and wildly determined, as you would have to be, to lead a team to open first Tate Modern and then, earlier this year, the gallery’s huge expansion. A large part of his skill has been political and diplomatic: he has persuaded successive culture ministers and chancellors he is a serious-minded, effective leader who, given just enough government support, is capable of creating something in the reflected glory of which they could bask. This skill has benefited others beyond Tate; he is one of a very few top cultural leaders who have been able to temper the severity of government cuts on the arts in general. And he has used similar resources of charm, argument and persuasion to open the wallets of legions of private donors.  Behind the skill comes the moral backbone. For all that Whitehall decided to raise his pay, his salary still hovers around the £170,000 mark. His counterpart at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Glenn Lowry, was paid $2.1m in 2013. Clearly, Serota could be making a great deal of money elsewhere, if he so wished. But he is an old-fashioned public servant. He believes in culture as a civic right; in the importance of art as a precious resource to be held in common by the nation as a whole. And he has taken Tate’s responsibility as the dominant institution in Britain’s art world seriously.  While London is overmighty in terms of the resources it receives to fund culture, Serota has always been a quiet but effective supporter of colleagues running poorer, less glamorous institutions around the country. For which reason, his next move to be chair of Arts Council England, bodes well. The arts in England could not hope for a more effective advocate at the head of its most significant funding body.  Of course, over a long career, there have been some slips, some ups and downs. There was a kerfuffle over Tate’s 2005 purchase of Chris Ofili’s installation The Upper Room while the artist was a trustee, leading to accusations of a conflict of interest. The Tate Modern extension, planned to coincide with the London Olympics, has in fact coordinated nicely with Rio, four years later. In 2015, he lost two directors – one of Tate Modern, one of Tate Britain – amid accusations that the latter gallery had lost its way.  In the end, these will be seen as small beer compared to his achievements. It all comes back to the art. A patient and wily administrator, he is, above all, a man who knows and loves art, a man who is curious about artists, a man who has curated great shows, from the hugely significant A New Spirit in Painting (1981) with Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy of Arts, to the glorious Cy Twombly exhibition (with Nicholas Cullinan) in 2008 at Tate Modern. Tate’s next director may be a great curator, a great administrator, or a great diplomat. They will be lucky if they can find all three qualities in one person.
For three decades, Serota has led Tate with ambition, charm and grit – opening world-class spaces, battling cuts and insisting culture is everyone’s right. That bodes well for his new employer Arts Council England – and for galleries across the country