With declining attendance and neglect of their core mission, churches and art galleries have a lot in common
This article is from the November 2023 issue of The Critic. To receive the full magazine, why not subscribe? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10..
WWhen the Tate Modern opened in London in 2000, it seemed to be the ideal Sunday pilgrimage destination for London’s otherwise idle middle classes. The contemporary art gallery would help ease the anxiety of modern life and fill the void left by the decline of organized religion. The question of how art acquired the authority to guide the liberal individual’s relationship with a secular society and what aesthetics and social forms this new cathedral of art would promote were at the center of the debate.
The museum is the spiritual successor of the church
The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. After the Reformation freed art from its sacred obligations, it also made aesthetics a civil affair. The first public museums such as the Victoria & Albert and the Smithsonian were founded in the 19th century and their main goal was the moral edification of the masses through art.
In the time it took to build Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, hundreds of equally grandiose museums have opened their doors across the world, proving the never-ending demand for secular spiritual experiences. Fittingly, Tate Modern’s first blockbuster was The weather projectthe installation of the yellow sun by Olafur Eliasson which made the public admire a replica of a celestial entity.
But today, the role and destiny of the museum risk reproducing those of the church which it seemed intended to replace. The museum faces fundamental challenges. She is haunted by a crisis of finality which manifests itself in the heated debates over the restitution of objects. A crisis of confidence has seen many institutions turn against art itself. Ultimately, it is a crisis of meaning that alienates the audience.
These problems surprise British museums, and most deny them. But institutions such as the Anglican Church have themselves faced the same dilemmas – not always successfully – and their struggles are the subject of constant debate. Even if we consider the museum and the cathedral to be in competition as providers of illumination, many of the existential threats they face are partly of their own making.
The revelation of the British Museum thefts and the escalating diplomatic debate over the future of the Parthenon Marbles are only the most visible manifestations of a deeper problem. While the museum’s mission was once to preserve and educate, it has expanded in recent years to encompass issues of social equity and diversity which, in turn, have forced institutions to rethink their approach to the canon that ‘they defend.
This is not a terrible thing as diversity in the collection would mean we all have more culture to enrich ourselves with. Perversely, this same omnivorous logic constructed museum collections from the spoils of empire. Today’s cultural expansionism is supposedly gentler (although artists who often complain about being exploited may disagree).
But art institutions are also desperate to “decolonize” their work, ensuring that they must declare themselves morally incompetent to manage certain parts of their collections and reject others as immoral. This marks a contradiction between the universalist principles which would value all culture and the essentialism which denounces cultural appropriation.
There are consequences. For example, there is a principled argument for returning some Benin bronzes from European museums to their Edo origins. But in reality, the fact that some of these objects returned by German museums have already disappeared into private hands in Nigeria rather than being exhibited to the public is an insult to this culture and its diaspora. Such problems are not just a matter of diligent administrative practice, but are rooted in confusion about the status of the museum in a changing world.
Christian churches grapple with versions of the same paradox. Ordaining women priests and blessing same-sex partnerships are just two examples in which compromise requires rewriting the core doctrines that govern their practice.
Given that until recently the immutability of the Church was considered one of its strengths, it is not surprising that a Church of England which today promotes a “third way” finds itself in deadlock. For the museum, which has evolved alongside liberalism itself, such contradictions are not yet apparent. But his impractical “fudge” could be just as damaging.
The biggest problem is that many museums are losing interest in art.
The biggest problem is that many museums are losing interest in art. It would be easy to blame artists for this crisis of faith: many museum visitors today are baffled by anything created after Duchamp’s 1917. Fountain. But not all the art that has filled museums and galleries since about 1960 deserves such contempt.
Conceptual artists, including the English group Art & Language and the self-destruction pioneer Gustav Metzger, certainly sparked a revolution against the image, but their work was not anti-aesthetic. in itself and their criticisms were specifically aimed at institutions. Even the sometimes shocking, sometimes hollow works of young British artists, like Tracey Emin, who were making their mark as Tate Modern opened its doors, reveled in art’s capacity to share the human experience.
No, the museum’s anti-art stance is the curator’s professional choice. In this it strangely follows the Church’s faltering relationship with God. Over the past 30 years, museums and contemporary art galleries have moved away from maintaining objects and focusing on caring for the public. Today, the financing of artistic institutions is based on cultural experiences that generate well-being and artistic projects that promote social cohesion. But rather than resisting instrumentalization, museums like to be seen as essential replacements for the declining community infrastructure that once included the parish church as an essential component.
Again, this is a good idea until these care responsibilities lead to aesthetic conflict. In June, Tate Britain hosted Queer and now, a festival of performances, film screenings and lectures organized under the auspices of LGBTQ+ Pride. There were market stalls where queer creatives sold their trinkets, a pop-up rave scene, and a protest banner-making workshop.
One could legitimately wonder whether this ideological cross between village festival and school disco deserved a place in the country’s premier artistic institution. But the real artistic crime was that event attendees had no interest in the exhibition by iconic queer filmmaker Isaac Julien (film strip, left), which was Tate’s main offering at the time. Rather than framing the festival around that of Julien artworkthe museum threw art under the bus to appear legitimate in the eyes of the queer community.
In his essay “Cura, the Curatorial and Paradoxes of Care,” scholar Ed McKeon points out that the institutionalization of pastoral care has overlapped with the decline of the moral authority by which the pastor once guided the flock. This lack gave the impression that the hierarchical difference between the institution and its subjects had also disappeared.
But institutions never willingly give up their power, and when they lack authority, they turn to authoritarianism. Orientation is transformed into governance, and therefore into corruption of the purpose of the institution.
This may or may not have been the history of the Church for centuries. But at Tate Britain, the festival was vigilantly monitored by a team of lanyard-wearing “Vibe Checkers,” members of staff who would ensure the museum was “a welcoming environment for everyone.” In the eyes of art, we are all equal until someone exhibits the wrong kind of “queer joy.”
Where are all the museum visitors and, of course, the parishioners who don’t pass the environmental check? Contemporary life offers them an infinite choice of spiritual fulfillment. There is a museum in the virtual world game Fortnite and a church in the Metaverse. But these institutions are in name only and their authority is derived from an algorithm. Yet many of us settle for that and scroll through our TikTok feeds until the machine understands our moral vision. As McKeon observes: “Curation is now omnipresent as the absence of foundation and destiny – for humans, for art, for truth itself – has become palpable. »
Despite all this, museums continue with unwavering confidence, constantly producing new narratives about their “relevance.” They claim to have the solution to the climate crisis or to be uniquely positioned to resolve racial tensions. They are so good at this that some churches even believe that art can solve the crisis of faith.
And maybe it’s possible. The motley 2019 installation at Norwich Cathedral attracted punters and at least some paused in awe at the religious art that has adorned the building’s walls for centuries.
But the foundations of this coalition may not be strong. Richard Parry, creative director of St James’s Church in Piccadilly, London, recently described the institution as “a space of community, compassion and wisdom”. That’s high praise from a curator who once led high-profile contemporary art events. But Parry, under whose tenure St James’s hosts organize evenings alongside music recitals, added that his institution “understands that it doesn’t matter in contemporary life”. With friends like this, who needs competitors?
If the cathedral and the museum can teach each other anything, it is that institutions that treat the image seriously have the greatest chance of survival. More and more people visited the Yayoi Kusama exhibition Infinite Rooms at the Tate which will never come together in an anti-aesthetic feel-good event at any museum.
Kusama’s experiential installations are messier than good art, but their success tells us something about the aesthetic needs of the population. Some museums still make their service a priority. Likewise, Christian denominations that continue to invest in the spectacle of worship fare better than those that attempt to accommodate conflicting ideas. There may be a theological explanation for this. But the aesthetic aspect is perhaps more convincing.