In Part I (here), we explored the role and significance of the Cathedral, as both religious and cultural monument. In Part II, we turn to the modern art museum.
Right up until the 19th century, cathedrals retained their status as by and large the most extravagant and spectacular cultural monuments in any European city. Few other buildings – including the most opulent of royal palaces – could compare with the sheer scale of the great cathedrals. Moreover, unlike a palace, a cathedral is and always was a public space. And then something changed. The God of Christianity gave way to the god of capital, and the creativity, energy and cash that had once been channelled into the building of churches now went into civic and industrial buildings instead. Entirely new forms of monumental architecture appeared in the landscape of European cities, including town halls, railway stations and – significantly – museums and art galleries: proud temples to the Victorian faith in progress. It is hardly surprising that the modern art museum has come to be known, albeit glibly, as the ‘cathedral’ of contemporary culture.
Of course, in one sense, all art museums are modern, an invention of the nineteenth century. The first public Art Gallery – in this country at least, if not in the world – was the Dulwich Picture Gallery, opened in 1811. London’s National Gallery began life in 1824 when the House of Commons agreed to the purchase of a 38-piece private collection belonging to a wealthy banker, John Julius Angerstein, to be the start of a public collection for the nation. A new building was constructed to house the expanding inventory on a site at Trafalgar square, which opened in 1838. Inevitably, therefore, most of the works in museums like the National Gallery were not originally made to be seen in the context in which we see them now.
Like the medieval Cathedral, the modern art museum is very often a flamboyant, attention-grabbing example of monumental architecture: extravagant, striking, expensive. These days, the most prestigious architectural projects, employing the most celebrated ‘starchitects’, are not government buildings, places of work or residence, but museums and other cultural venues, which – like churches – arguably serve no strictly utilitarian purpose, but are rather monuments to their own ends. There are numerous examples of this. Indeed, iconic buildings seem to be proliferating to the point of becoming generic. A few examples among many would include the Guggenheim, New York, by Frank Lloyd Wright (1959), Sydney Opera House by Jorn Utzon (1973), and the Pompidou centre in Paris (1977) by Richard Rogers, also responsible for the Millennium Dome, Heathrow Terminal 5, and the Lloyds building. Perhaps the most iconic of them all, and undoubtedly one of the most spectacular and original buildings of the twentieth century, is surely the Guggenheim, Bilbao, by Frank Gehry (1997).
In common with the cathedral before it, the modern art museum is also a potent symbol of civic or national identity and prestige. The objects on display – about which many visitors might be relatively ignorant except with regard to their priceless value – represent the wealth and power of the state that owns them. Many museums even look like temples; as, for that matter, does the Bank of England. This is no coincidence. The imperial ambitions of 19th century Europe deliberately evoked the imperial legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Moreover, in the ancient world, temples actually were banks, accepting deposits of treasure for safekeeping under the protection of the deity and even effecting loans and transfers. Indeed, the word ‘bank’ comes from banco – literally bench – the Latin word used for the tables of the moneychangers in the Jerusalem Temple. National art museums are, similarly, repositories of wealth, containing as they do the priceless treasures of the state – often looted in war and carried away as booty by the victors to be shown off in new ‘temples’.
Works once made for churches are now held (like prisoners?) in secular museums – which have ironically become temples in their own right. The art is often displayed in a manner reminiscent of sacred artefacts – perhaps even in a special room with low lighting and bullet-proof glass to protect the sacred object. Crowds jostle in front of famous works, like pilgrims venerating relics, not so much to study them in depth, but simply in order to be able to say they’ve seen the original, often taking an obligatory ‘selfie’ and posting it on social media to show they were there. The object of the gallery visit then is neither educational nor aesthetic: it is simply to be in the presence of the attraction, to participate in the spectacle. People go to these places to see something. This is as true today as it was in ages past; and it is as true of churches, ruined castles, and art museums as it is of shopping centres or theme parks. We go to these places to pay homage to cultural fetish objects – whether they are dresses we cannot afford, famous works of art, or the relics of saints.
But the question remains. Is there any sense in which the modern art museum is not only a substitute cathedral in terms of what it symbolises, but also a place in which people find or express their spirituality? For many people, a visit to a museum is – by their own account – comparable with a visit to a church. People generally take a very formal approach to an art museum visit. Objects are venerated in hushed tones or reverential silence, and visitors noticeably adopt a slow respectful gait as they tiptoe carefully through the hallowed chambers…
The Tate Modern
Thousands cross the Millennium Footbridge everyday, many of them heading for Tate Modern. The museum occupies the recycled shell of a former power station, itself a temple to the industrial age. The Bankside power station was built by Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of the great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, in two stages in 1947 and 1963. It finally closed as a power station in 1981 and was re-opened as the Tate Modern in 2000. The cavernous cathedral-like interior of the famous turbine hall is oriented, like a church, on an east-west axis. But unlike a cathedral, with its icons and relics of the saints, its Christian symbols pointing towards a divine ‘other’, the galleries of Tate Modern are crammed with icons and relics cataloguing predominantly reflexive images of our own human experience: a testament not of faith but self-expression.
Five million people visit Tate Modern every year. Whatever else this indicates, ‘high’ art would appear to have undergone a degree of democratisation – though I would be very surprised if all five million of those visitors were able to read the works on display with the same degree of sophistication as the ‘high priesthood’ of curators and critics. Modern and contemporary art has never had a wider audience. We go – like pilgrims to sacred sites – to see what is there to be seen because that’s what everyone else is doing. In contrast to historical art museums, such as the National Gallery, which contain works that were originally sited elsewhere, the modern art museum is specifically intended – and very often purpose-built – precisely in order to house works that were invariably made for such spaces. Just as art used to be made for churches, now it is made for museum collections. Indeed, much contemporary art simply couldn’t be sited anywhere else; nor could it even be understood as art outside the context of the art museum, which defines it as being art in the first place. Some works even become part of the fabric of the museum itself, such as Shibboleth (2007) by Doris Salcedo – the famous ‘crack’ in the floor of the turbine hall.
Contemporary museum architecture reinforces the notion of the museum as temple, whilst at the same time, historic cathedrals have steadily become more and more like museums. This is reflected, somewhat ironically, in the fact that major exhibitions of sacred art are displayed in museums and galleries, while cathedrals and churches become ever more popular venues for exhibitions of art that is ostensibly secular. Indeed, Cathedrals seem to be falling over themselves to host exhibitions and installations of contemporary art. In these cases, it is interesting to note that artworks with no explicitly religious connotations can suddenly and unexpectedly acquire them when installed in a sacred space; whilst religious works, divorced from their original context and exhibited in secular museums and galleries, are at the same time reduced to objects of purely aesthetic veneration. But this should not be surprising. One of the characteristics of art has always been its ability to stimulate reflection on metaphysical questions. Although for the most part contemporary art is seldom religious in any conventional sense, nevertheless, there is much modern and contemporary art that contains spiritual resonances, whether intentionally or not.
It has become a commonplace to describe art as the ‘new religion’ of modern life, and art galleries and museums as the ‘new cathedrals’. One has only to visit the Rothko room at Tate Modern to see why. There, in a dimly lit shrine-like room hung with Rothko’s brooding canvases, devotees sit rapt in silent contemplation. They could easily be mistaken for people praying – a response very much intended by the artist whose works have been described as ‘icons of the absence of God’. Whilst such assertions may be contested, there clearly are significant ways in which art and religion do share common ground – the Christian doctrine of creation being an obvious starting point. But can we go so far as to describe art, and in particular the activity of visiting museums and looking at art, as a form of implicit religiosity, or do the apparent similarities in the behaviour of visitors to cathedrals and art museums bear no more than a merely superficial resemblance?
The relationship between religion and culture would appear to be very ancient. At Delphi, location of the temple of Apollo and the famous Delphic oracle – one of the most important sacred sites in the ancient world – there was a theatre in the middle of the temple complex, and a stadium further up the mountainside, emphasising the symbiotic relationship between sacred ritual, dramatic performance and games of skill and chance. The situation is really no different today, except that now it’s more difficult to tell the difference between religion and entertainment, for entertainment has become our cultic religion and its ‘stars’ our deities or idols; while traditional religion, especially in its institutional forms, is widely seen as little more than a hobby for people who don’t know any better.
It could be argued that people who visit art museums are participating in an implicitly religious activity – even if unconsciously – just as it is sometimes claimed that aesthetic experiences have something in common with religious experiences. A number of people have suggested that contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. Art can also provide a vehicle for social action and community building, two activities that were formerly the domain of churches. That said, there are also, of course, important ways in which museums are not like churches. For example, the life-cycle rites that are fundamental to traditional religions are entirely absent from the notion of art as implicit or secular religion, and there is nothing that happens in an art museum that is analogous to the celebration of the Eucharist.
It is possible to see museums as cathedrals and cathedrals as museums, but if art really is the religion of modern life, then it is an idolatrous religion of the self, rather than a divine other, and ultimately empty.
Thanks for this - Interesting reflections on the complex relationships between places of worship, galleries and banks.