The Tate Britain sell out?

The Tate Gallery has gone into the holiday business. January is the time for booking that summer break. Click on the Tate's website shop and you will find a range of holidays "inspired by Tate", among the kitchen mugs and poster prints.

Is the Tate diluting its brand? Tate Enterprises, as the commercial wing is known, is a product of governmental parsimony towards cultural institutions, which were once wholly funded and now have to find 30 to 40 per cent of their budgets elsewhere; Tate runs a business because it has to.

The four-sited museum costs £50 million a year to run, with the Government paying just over £28 million. It farms out its brand - a monosyllable and fuzzy-edged logo - to companies that long to be associated with an aspirational lifestyle. The four per cent that Tate will take by way of commission for that naughty weekend in Sicily is hardly going to staunch Nicholas Serota's deacquisition threat, made last month, when he warned that the Tate may have to sell some works to upgrade its overall collection.

Tate Enterprises currently raises £2.8 million from related products and publications; a further £1 million comes from in-house catering.

But has the brand extension gone too far?

My local B&Q now stocks Tate-branded household paint and wallpaper. "This palette liberates choice," gushes the B&Q blurb. I was looking for an off-white with a hint of grey in homage to the pigeon droppings on Sarah Lucas's Trafalgar Square proposal. I also tried to find a salmonpink that might recall the flesh tones of the Chapman brothers' Turner Prize blow-up doll. In vain. B&Q does tasteful Tate; not YBA, more Tate-I-Y.

In an organisation where everything, down to the daily restaurant menu, is determined by the highest office, the franchises appear to be strategically pitched. Package holidaymakers and B&Q customers may not be regular gallery-goers. Homefrom-home and home improvement might entice them across the Tate threshold.

But there is more than one price to pay for populism. No longer a place, the Tate became a brand four years ago when a memo went out to all staff ordering them to drop the definite article. "Turner's finest work is to be found at Tate" became correct usage. A generation of curators and art historians learned to speak stilted English as their second language.

This was the pathway to Magic Holidays "Inspired by Tate", aimed at a gap in the market somewhere between the rampant haze of Club 18-30 and Saga's genteel greys. You could imagine Tony and Cherie taking a post-Hutton Tate Break in Tuscany. The holidays are "art-themed", more Prada than Prado (note lack of definite article when it comes to shopping).

There are city breaks to Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Venice, Florence, Rome and, er, Lanzarote - with a goodie-bag which will include a guidebook compiled by a Tate curator, VIP passes at the Gatwick executive lounge and a sketchbook and paints should the inspiration prove irresistible. Upon your return, there will be a year's free membership to the gallery, to continue your cultural growth.

Other museums arrange tours for their subscribers, but the Tate trips are different - they are more about the Tate tag on your luggage than a collective charabanc. The Tate Holiday Collection reconfigures the great British tradition of the Grand Tour for the attention-deficiencies of the mini-break generation.