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LOCATION: Bankside,on the South Bank; main entrance and wheelchair access on Holland St.; secondary entrance on Queen’s Walk. CONTACT: 7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk. TUBE: Southwark or Blackfriar’s. AUDIOGUIDES: 5 tours including for children and the visually impaired. £1. TOURS: meet on the gallery concourses; free. History/Memory/Society 10:30am, level 3; Nude/Body/Action 11:30am, level 3; Landscape/Matter/Environment 2:30pm, level 5; Still Life/Object/Real Life 3:30pm, level 5. TALKS: M-F 1pm. Meet at concourse on appropriate level; free. OPEN: Su-Th 10am-6pm, F-Sa 10am-10pm. ADMISSION: Free; special exhibitions £5-7, concs. £1 off.

Since opening in May 2000, Tate Modern has been credited with single-handedly reversing the long-term decline in museum-going numbers in Britain. The largest modern art museum in the world, its most striking aspect is the Giles Gilbert Scott’s building, formerly the Bankside power station. A conversion by Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron has added a seventh floor with wraparound views of north and south London, and turned the old Turbine Hall into an immense atrium that doubles as an exhibition space that often overpowers the installations commissioned for it. Of actual gallery space, a full one third—the entirety of level 4—is dedicated to temporary exhibitions. One nice touch is the provision of rest areas around the galleries, with chairs, books, and recorded commentary on various subjects by artists, intellectuals, and celebrities.

For all its popularity, the Tate has been criticized for its controversial curatorial method. By grouping works according to themes such as “Subversive Objects” or “Staging Discord,” you might say the Tate has turned itself into a work of conceptual art—as many words are used to explain the logic behind each room’s collection as the meaning behind the works themselves. Perhaps mindful of criticism, curators have stealthily begun arranging more works by period and artist, but officially, everything is still categorized according to four major themes: Still Life/Object/Real Life and Landscape/Matter/Environment on level 3, and Nude/Action/Body and History/Memory/Society on level 5. Even skeptics must admit that this arrangement throws up some interesting contrasts: successes include the nascent geometry of Cézanne’s Still Life with Water Jug overlooking the checkerboard tiles of Carl André’s Steel Zinc Plain in the “Desire for Order” room of the Still Life/Object/Real Life, and the juxtaposition of Monet’s indistinct Waterlilies with Richard Long’s energetic Waterfall Line, painted directly onto the gallery wall with mud, in Landscape/Matter/Environment. In other rooms, the purported theme is little more than a smokescreen for some conventional curation: also in Landscape/Matter/Environment, the “Inner Worlds” array of works by Dalí, Miró, Magritte, Ernst, and de Chirico proves only that Surrealism by any other name is no less bizarre. The greatest achievement of the thematic display is that it forces visitors into contact with an exceptionally wide range of art. It’s now impossible to see the Tate’s more famous pieces, which include Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, and Picasso’s Weeping Woman, without also confronting challenging and invigorating works by little-known contemporary artists.

This important retrospective is dedicated to the amorphous Art & Language movement, which it traces from its origins in the 1960s to the present day. A new installation by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden recalls the movement’s 1972 ‘Index’, considered one of the most influential works of conceptual art ever. All the different artefacts created by the members of Art & Language over the years – record covers, posters, magazines, books, paintings – are represented here. The group Jackson Pollock Bar, from Friburg, Germany, is giving a special performance on Apr 17.

Throughout the 1960s, actor Dennis Hopper chronicled the world around him in black-and-white photographs. Long before ‘Easyrider’ – the influential 1969 film classic he both directed and starred in – Hopper was bringing his intensity and eye for detail to the art world. His photos have been displayed at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. They range from prints of graffiti covered walls to those that reveal the complex personalities behind pop culture icons like Andy Warhol or thinkers like Martin Luther King and Timothy Leary. All together, they make for a powerful show.