ABSTRACT
Museums, as modem ceremonial monuments, belong to the same architectural class as temples, churches, shrines, and certain kinds of palaces. The museum serves as a ceremonial monument; its space and collection present an ensemble of art objects that functions as an iconographic program. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MOMA) in its way represents the Chartres of mid-twentieth-century modern art museums. More than any other museum, MOMA developed the ritual forms that translated the ideology of late capitalism into immediate and vivid artistic terms - a monument to individualism, understood as subjective freedom. Modern high art expresses individualism largely through the use of unconventional visual languages: Each artist strives to invent a distinctive one, implicitly denying the possibility of a shared world of experience. The more subjective and abstract the visual language, the more unique and individualized the artist’s consciousness.
