ABSTRACT
We have grown accustomed to associating the rise of the museum with the decline of organized religion as a source of individual meaning and social cohesion. Art and culture have become new sources of spirituality in the West, the argument goes; art museums are the cathedrals of our time. Over two hundred years ago the young Goethe made the connection when he described his first visit to the Dresden museum as an experience which “opened a new prospect to me, and one that has had its effect on my whole life. With what delight, nay intoxication, did I wander through the sanctuary of that gallery!” From that moment “the love of art … stayed with me like a guardian angel.”1 Goethe’s testimony notwithstanding, recent critics have drawn only negative conclusions from the analogy, identifying the sort of uplift Goethe describes as bourgeois mystification masking the denaturing of art and the interests of the museum’s sponsors. In this account, museum rituals have replaced rituals of the church and serve to enforce social hierarchies, political agendas, nationalistic myths, and art’s commodification. The loss of original function inflicted on art transferred to the silent, eternal resting place of the museum gave rise to a second metaphor: the museum as tomb – and lately to a third: the museum as a shopping mall.
