WHEN TATE MODERN OPENED IN London in 2000, it seemed the ideal Sunday pilgrimage destination for London’s otherwise-idle middle classes. The contemporary art gallery would help quell the anxiety of modern life and fill the void left by the decline in organised religion. How art gained 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 the centre of debate.
The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. After the Reformation freed art from its sacral obligations, it also turned aesthetics into a civil matter. Early public museums such as the Victoria & Albert and the Smithsonian were founded in the nineteenth century and their core aim was the moral edification of the masses through art.
In the time it has so far taken to build Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família Basilica in Barcelona, hundreds of just-as-grand museums have opened across the world, proving the unceasing, Olafur Eliasson’s yellow sun installation which had audiences gazing in awe at a replica of a celestial entity.
