It has the makings of a really eccentric museum, and they are the best kind. What it contains is our folk art - our collective depository of myths and images, which we can all feed our imaginations on. Folk Archive is a key to this museum's strange, secret world of British cultural history. Tate Britain is full of images straight out of a folk song. Visiting Tate Britain is like listening to folk music - you could start to enjoy it.
Folk art is politically ambiguous.
British art from the past is fiercely patriotic, from the nobly shed blood of Major Peirson to William Hogarth's painting of starving Frenchies and Jacobites looking with longing at the Roast Beef of Old England. But there's also a savage satire in this art, that is not opposed to its patriotism but a part of it. You can see it in Henry Fuseli's transformation of popular superstitions into his nightmarishly surreal painting of Titania and Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the fairy folk are not cute but sinister. The danger with Britain's love affair with modern art is that we risk repressing all this. Tate Modern is an austerely seductive image of the new.