Classified

A title like 'Recent Acquisitions' might have sounded dull and functional; a more straightforward title would have been 'Some British art we've bought because we think it's good'. It's easy to forget that Tate is still in the business of collecting artworks and 'Classified' is an interesting grouping of British art from the past two decades - an opportunity to see 'contemporary' art slowly slipping away into art history, as seen through the lens of Tate Britain's collection.

So while the curator-speak of the wall texts rambles incoherently about systems of knowledge and classification just to spin together works as historically diverse as Simon Patterson's reworded London Underground map, 'The Great Bear' (1992), or Peter Peri's dark geometrical abstract painting 'Woodcutter' (2008), there are really two exhibitions here: one of the YBAs of the 1990s, and another of the more diversified concerns of artists who emerged during the noughties. It's just a pity that they're all jumbled together as if history didn't matter.

Because while there are some great works in the show - from Rebecca Warren's boisterous and crude clay sculpture 'Come Helga' (2006) to Tacita Dean's elegiac film 'Michael Hamburger' (2007) - 'Classified' is dominated by recent (and belated) acquisitions by Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers which it seems anxious to show off. Hirst's 1992 'Pharmacy', a replica chemist's full of pharmaceuticals, is the high-gloss epitome of art as intoxication, while his 1991 'The Acquired Inability to Escape', a vitrine containing a desk, a chair, a full ashtray and just one more fag waiting to be lit, is a more tragicomic ode to addiction. The 'Chapman Family Collection' (2002) is a darkened room of pseudo-ethnographic 'African' totems, which all turn out to look a bit like Ronald McDonald and his friends. A scathing, puerile, politically correct attack on modernism's colonialist fascination with the primitive, it now seems stuck in its moment, wilfully goading and provoking.

Still, it's all history now, isn't it? 'Classified' may hint at gaps in Tate's collection which the curation can't quite disguise, but it hums with the energies of past artistic questions, still alive in the heart of the museum.