What art museums should learn from Christianity

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What art museums should learn from Christianity 

Alain de Botton ABC Religion and Ethics 22 Feb 2012

 

 "Christianity never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to teach us how to live, what to love and what to be afraid of ... You often hear it said that "museums of art are our new churches." In other words, in a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion ... It's an intriguing idea - part of the broader ambition that culture should replace scripture - but in practice art museums often abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, sanctuary, redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them ... While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame them in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs. The problem is that modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters, because Modernist aesthetics (in which curators are trained) is so deeply suspicious of any hint of an instrumental approach to culture ... To have an answer anyone could grasp as to the question of why art matters is too quickly viewed as "reductive" ... We have too easily swallowed the Modernist idea that art which aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be "bad art" (Soviet art is routinely trotted out here as an example) and that only art which wants nothing too clearly of us can be good ... Hence the all-too-frequent question with which we leave the modern museum of art: what did that mean?" ... Click here to read & watch more