Meditations for Lent: can museums promote greater understanding between faiths when by their very definition they separate art from the religious cultures that created it?

Apollo, March, 2008 by Michael Hall

Last month the British media marked the beginning of Lent with the traditional ceremony of bashing the archbishop. A lecture on Islam in English law delivered by Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, was widely reported as proposing that Islamic sharia law should be given legal status in the UK. From the tone of the next day's headlines, you might have been forgiven for thinking that adulterers were already being stoned to death on Tower Hill. In fact, the archbishop's delicately nuanced speech simply explored the idea that Enlightenment thought has separated law from faith with too great a rigour, and so western legal systems fail to pay sufficient attention to people's religious identity.

This may not seem to have much to do with art, but it raises issues of multiculturalism, a topic that has become entwined in debates about art in remarkably complex ways. 'Multiculturalism' is a term with at least two levels of meaning: firstly, that all cultures are equally valid and therefore should be treated equally--the idea that the archbishop was assumed to be propounding--and, secondly, a softer version of the idea, that the separate identifies of different cultures should be treated with respect. It has come to be assumed, at least in the UK, that museums and galleries are committed to multiculturalism in this milder form. Indeed, the idea that museums have a multicultural mission is a major motive in the desire of two important collectors of Islamic art, David Khalili--who is interviewed in this issue--and the Aga Khan, to cream museums devoted to the subject.

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Such museums can only, of course, prompt greater knowledge and understanding of Islam's artistic heritage. But will they therefore promote greater harmony between Islam and other cultures? Is there any evidence that the great museums of Christian art--which is what all the major galleries of Old Master painting and sculpture in effect are--have promoted greater understanding of Christianity among non-Christians?

Perhaps because museums are quintessential products of Enlightenment culture, purely religious emotion tends to be neutralised within their walls. If anyone fell to their knees in front of an altarpiece in an art gallery, we would probably think that they were mad. The occasional religious protest about art in museums or galleries--such as the campaign against the display last year by the Lab Gallery in Manhattan of Cosimo Cavallaro's 'chocolate Jesus', My Sweet Lord--comes therefore as a shock. Such objections can be shrugged off as eccentricities of the Christian right, but that is not so easy with Muslim touchiness about blasphemy. According to a report in The Art Newspaper last month, the Museum of Danish Cartoon Art believes that its proposed purchase of the 12 newspaper caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that prompted riots across the world should cause no offence, since their inflammatory nature would be extinguished once within a museum collection. This seems to me unduly optimistic.

Although by their very definition museums exclude expressions of religious belief and emotion, we still piously hope that they will help mutual understanding of cultures that base their identity on religion. Appealing although this is to politicians (especially in the UK) who expect museums to fulfil social purposes, such as promoting 'soft' multiculturalism, it seems to me to misunderstand what museums do, which is encourage greater understanding of a culture's art. The separation of art and religion in museums has its origins in the same cultural gulf, originating in the Enlightenment, that separates law and religion. As the archbishop discovered to his cost, that gulf runs very deep.