Art City: Among the Myriad Delights of Liverpool's Year of Culture, the City's Biennial, Now in Its Fifth Cycle, Still Stands Out

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'Liverpool has an artistic streak', observed Alan Bowness, Tate Gallery director, at the 1985 press launch of the renewed Albert Dock. Around us, work had begun on Stirling's conversion of the west warehouse to a branch of the national museum of modern art. Seventy years after its founding by a Liverpool sugar magnate, Bowness declared, the Tate was coming home.

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Yet though Bowness' Tate was to be praised for its initiative (would that the BM, V & A, and National Gallery follow northward!), for this reporter in the crowd, a question arose as to what, exactly, should be the role of such a museum? For, of the new and its accumulation, there are no limits; it keeps coming, and piling up; and none who enter London's Tate Bankside …