Arts Leadership with Sir Alex Beard — RSA Salon
Former Tate Modern CEO Sir Alex Beard on leading cultural institutions through austerity, digital disruption, and shifting public expectations of what museums are for.
Why we picked this
Beard ran the Tate Modern during a period when the museum had to simultaneously expand physically, justify its public subsidy, and respond to debates about colonial collections — the lessons from that stretch are not abstract for anyone who works in or cares about cultural institutions.
Sir Alex Beard served as CEO of Tate Modern during one of the most consequential periods in the museum’s history, overseeing the opening of the Switch House extension in 2016 and navigating the institution through post-Brexit austerity, the disruptions of the pandemic, and an intensifying global debate about how major Western museums handle colonial-era collections. Under his leadership, Tate Modern became one of the most visited museums in the world — and one of the most closely watched for how it responded to pressure on all sides.
At this RSA Salon, Beard reflects on what leading a large cultural institution actually demands: how you balance the permanence of the collection against the urgency of contemporary social questions, how you sustain public trust in a moment of institutional skepticism, and how you think about succession in organizations that outlast any individual leader. He brings a practitioner’s hard-won clarity to questions that often remain theoretical in arts policy discussions.
The RSA Salon format is deliberately conversational — a smaller room, more dialogue, less performance — which suits the kind of candor that institutional leadership rarely invites in public settings.