The Tate Modern being Scrouge?

[Jill]

This story was told to me by our member Alan Goble.:

Below is a picture of an installation called Doris's Crack which is now at the Tate Modern. It cost over £250,000 to put it in:


This is what the Tate have to say on this 'work of art'=

"Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.
Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works"

BUT here is another side to the story:

Despite spending £200 million on an expansion programme and £250,000 on this crack in the floor to represent the gap between the rich and the poor, the Tate Modern does not pay its cleaning staff a living wage! .

So they had a singing protest by the Crack last week:


Cleaners and caterers took over the main hall of the Tate Modern gallery as part of a pay protest. Contract workers at the south London gallery say their wage does not cover the true cost of living in the capital.

Led by the South London Citizens group, dozens of protesters linked hands and sang in its turbine hall on Friday.A Tate spokesman said: "Tate ensures all its contractors must comply with the statutory requirement to provide at least the national minimum wage." Contract workers at the gallery currently receive the national minimum wage of £5.52 per hour. They want this increased to £7.20 per hour, which is known as the London Living Wage - a wage level suggested to reflect the extra cost of living in the capital. South London Citizens spokesman Michael Faulkner said: "Everyone recognises that living in London is more expensive than living anywhere else. "We believe that the Tate as a major and very successful employer ought to be recognising their responsibilities to make sure that all their employees are properly remunerated for the work that they do."

What do you think? Should the Tate Modern stop being Scrouge and pay it's workers the Living Wage this year?