The subtly ecclesiastical character of museum architecture, and the more and more evident ecclesiastical behavior of art audiences, can feel especially ironic when you remember how foreign actual religion is to the world of contemporary art. We expect to come up against explicitly religious art only in historical exhibitions or, more problematically, non-western displays. Contemporary art with a true religious conviction, on the other hand, sticks out. At the Venice Biennale, at which nations mount individual exhibitions, the Vatican’s display is reliably mocked as retrograde or irrelevant. And during the last edition of Documenta, the German megashow held once every five years, artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev found herself in a bizarre spat with the local Catholic church, which installed a figurative sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol in the belfry of Kassel’s Elisabethkirche. She wanted the sculpture removed, lest anyone think that the (not very impressive) artwork was part of her show.

If Christov-Bakargiev felt that her Documenta, the largest and most important contemporary art exhibition in the entire world, was threatened by a single work of art in a church, that may be because art might not want to advertise its recent embrace of forms and functions once reserved for things holy. The legacy of the Enlightenment – for better, for worse – is that only rational, secular knowledge counts as truth today, whereas the kind of truth claimed by religion has no public purchase, only a personal one. Museums, not only art museums but also museums of history and of natural science, were for most of their past devoted to that first, secular form of truth, discovered through rigorous study and exhibited in systematic ways. It seems more and more, in this age of immersive installations and monumentally scaled sculptures, that that scientifically inspired age is passing. Those soaring glass atriums in Paris and Abu Dhabi are in line with the spirit of the times, which now aspire to a different form of truth – something vaguer but more comforting for smartphone-wielding aesthetes still unmoored by the death of God.

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