Tom Sutcliffe: You can have too much Rothko

Visiting the Mark Rothko show at Tate Modern the other day, I felt there was something odd about the atmosphere of the large room in which the exhibition organisers have hung the famous Seagram Murals – the paintings that were commissioned and painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, before the artist decided he couldn't square the work's aesthetic seriousness with the expense-account audience that would enjoy privileged access to it.

Tate Modern already owns a large collection of the works Rothko produced for this commission and has borrowed more – so that it can reconstruct at least one of the putative hangs for this space. And entering the room, I found that it didn't quite deliver the punch of sacred enclosure that quite a lot of writing about Rothko might lead you to expect – and which the Tate's ordinary, segregated hang of these paintings can sometimes achieve. There were a lot more people around, for one thing – and a lot more of them than usual seemed to be sitting on Tate Modern's big arched benches, as if already exhausted by the task ahead.

I struggled for a while with a rather banal problem of perception – trying to decide whether I was looking at carefully crafted fuzziness or simply hadn't got to grips with new varifocal lenses – and then sat down and joined them. And after a while, one explanation for the air of patient expectation in the room suggested itself. We were all waiting for the paintings to work.

It's possible that this is just projection on my part. But I don't think I was the only person there experiencing an unsettling mismatch between the publicity for the show and the experience itself. It must be a long time since any Tate hosted a show requiring the audience to build such a bridge between ends and means, or one that contains less obvious variety of spectacle.

The colours are confined to a narrow chunk of the spectrum and the repertoire of shapes is small – scuffed rectangles, henge-like uprights. Yet the rhetoric you bring with you is one of transcendent vision and a philosophical sense of the sublime. It is a rhetoric of overwhelming impact, so that it's going to be a very delicate sensibility, or a very confident one, that doesn't experience at least a brief shock of disconnection – the feeling that either we or the paintings aren't properly plugged in, that the current isn't flowing.

Even the exhibition itself appears to feel this anxiety, including an analytical section devoted to arguing that although some of the canvases might look like the kind of bish-bosh Abstract Expressionism Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen can run up for a room makeover, they are actually mille-feuille of painterly decision, layer upon layer of meticulous reconsideration and adjustment. It's a common enough feature of art shows these days, but here it carries a faint sense of disquiet: the suggestion that what you can see of the painting might not be enough to hold your attention.

Which leads back, I think, to the odd mood in that room. It isn't just that visitors are waiting for the paintings to work on them. It's also that they're trying to work out how to go to work on the paintings – and how exactly a limited quantity of contemplation should be divided up between so many superficially similar canvases. It's the uncertain hesitation of people who've just realised that the thing you might really need from a Rothko blockbuster exhibition is fewer Rothkos, and more time.

... and not enough Roth

It looks as though Philip Roth shouldn't be holding his breath for the Nobel Committee to call, even though the announcement of the Prize for Literature is due any day. "Europe is still the centre of the literary world... not the United States," the permanent secretary of the Academy, Horace Engdahl, said this week to AP. He got ruder, too. American writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", he said. "They don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature".

They certainly don't as the Nobel defines it. It has been 15 years since Toni Morrison won a Nobel for literature, and another 17 years before that when Saul Bellow took the prize. Does a list that has found room for Nelly Sachs, Ivo Andrich, Halldor Laxness and Eyvind Johnson, but can't find space for Norman Mailer or Roth, have its own problems with parochialism?

* The literature of left-wing ideological zeal has been building nicely. Philip Roth provided a central text with I Married a Communist, but younger writers have started to get in on the act. Hari Kunzru's My Revolution was a brilliant recreation of Sixties radical activism, and now The Believers by Zoe Heller skewers the imperfect translation of ideal into practice of a bourgeois Marxist in New York. How long, I wonder, before the children of the free-market true believers give us their own darkly comic accounts of the latest god to fail?

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