'They wasted your money'

If you like a bit of instant history, or if you like your nostalgia served dew-fresh, then hurry along to Tate Modern. There you will see Out of Time, an exhibition dedicated to the triumphs of the Millennium Commission, a body that spent more than £2 billion of Lottery money on projects to celebrate the year 2000.

It already seems so distant, that magical date, and the breathless futuristic architecture that went with it - all shiny metal and bulbous shapes - now looks as dated as mullets or flares.

"Triumphs of the Millennium Commission" is a slim subject, and the exhibition (until 19 December) is accordingly petite. It also lacks the sharp conceptual edge of a typical Tate Modern show. If you listen carefully you can hear the sounds of Sir Nicholas Serota's arm being twisted, and his teeth gritting, as he is obliged to host it in return for the £50 million that the Millennium Commission granted the Tate.

What you see, mounted on 1990s-style inflatable display stands, is a series of panels praising various millennium projects. The Millennium Commission has "helped change the face of the UK", "left a lasting legacy" and "supported ingenuity from the world's first rotating boat lift to Europe's deepest underwater viewing tunnel". The exhibition's blurbs are at pains to point out, reasonably enough, that the enterprise was not only about new landmarks for 2000, but also cycleways and nature reserves. There is a heartwarming photograph, to underline the point of "Sparky the Muncaster barn owl".

Some notorious flops, such as the Earth Centre, the ecological experience near Doncaster, are not mentioned in the show, but even among those included in this smiling family photograph, dark secrets are hidden. There is the Renaissance of Portsmouth Harbour, for example, where they are still trying to erect a preposterous viewing tower (an object which seems to have escaped from the Pyongyang World Fair of 1958).

Or take Wales. Wales could have been the site of a millennium triumph, in the form of Zaha Hadid's noble design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House. With this work Cardiff could have been Bilbao, and Wales would have had the first major building by an architect who is now building all over the world. Yet, amid suspicions that Cardiff 's city fathers really wanted an architect more male and less Iraqi than Hadid, her scheme was shamefully knifed.

Instead Wales got a National Botanic Garden, which recently announced a £353,000 bale-out. While "searching to find a funding partner", the NBG "will be operated with a skeleton staff ". "Appropriate redundancy packages" will be awarded. Wales also got the Millennium Stadium, in appearance the hideous mating of a DIY superstore and a suspension bridge. Despite hosting rugby internationals and the FA Cup, the stadium is still having trouble balancing the books.

And Wales is getting the Wales Millennium Centre, an opera house by another name, if they can find the £8 million they need to finish it. In theory the design, by Jonathan Adams of the Percy Thomas Partnership, is "unmistakably Welsh and internationally outstanding"-which is a cue for some very big Welsh words over the entrance, and such nationalistic bilge as "the durability of stone reminds us of the persistence of the Welsh Nation through the ages". As for the "internationally outstanding" part, the design looks like a giant shell-less mollusc crawling over a pile of slate. Jonathan Adams does not quite have the international standing of Hadid.

There is more. The Nat ional Space Centre in Leicester is a giant condom of a building, where the nation's mind is expanded by an event called "Santa vs the Daleks at the Xmas toy fair", and by questions such as "Did man really walk on the Moon?" (yes) and "Do space probe images show UFOs?" (no). There is the pointless Millennium Point in Birmingham, and the Lowry in Salford, which looks like a breakfast-TV set made into a national monument.

There is, finally, the Dome, peeking shyly from the bottom corner of a display panel at Tate Modern, as if it were a village hall in Argyll, and not the biggest national money drain since the invention of Concorde. It is presented with the barefaced lie that it " kickstarted" the regeneration of the Greenwich peninsular. When things are kick-started they roar into life; three years after the Dome closed, there is little sign of its hinterland doing this.