After the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam reopened in 2012 following a years-long closure and redevelopment, its main slogan was ‘Meet the icons of modern art.’ As one of the major modern and contemporary art museums of The Netherlands, its activities and collection displays centered around the greats of modern art, artists whose works were presented as such to the public. The museum’s slogan produced a mutual reinforcement between the status of the museum itself and the artists of which it holds works in the collection. Resonating names like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, and Barnett Newman reflect in turn on the quality of the museum itself. They are artists who have been, and still are, seen as undeniable iconic artists. However, early 2021 museum director Rein Wolfs could be seen scraping off the museum’s slogan from its façade.1 Within not even ten years after the grand reopening, the slogan was deemed to have become redundant and old-fashioned. It was seen to be representative of an outdated approach to art history, one that purports a comprehensive selection of canonical artists and artworks and a defined (predominantly white and male) sense of artistic genius. By scraping the slogan from the façade, the museum meant to demonstrate its commitment to a renewed approach to art history: an approach with more attention for previously non-canonical, forgotten, or ignored artists and voices in art. This commitment also represented another mode of curatorial work. Rather than top-down, what is relevant and important to be displayed in the museum was from then on decided from a more bottom-up approach, in conversation with representatives of previously ignored or excluded groups. This new mode of curating, so is the ideal, will transform the museum from a site of presentation into one of representation.
While for the Stedelijk Museum the notion of icons was no longer deemed relevant, just one year before the Kunsthalle in Bremen, Germany staged a major exhibition titled Icons: Adoration and Worship. In this exhibition, its departure point was to explore ‘how the concept of the icon unites aspects of worship, the sacred, and the idea of transcendence’2 from a transhistorical perspective. The exhibited objects ranged from Byzantine icons to modern and contemporary artworks and explored how a particular sense of power or presence was communicated through artistic objects. The iconic was not only interpreted in terms of religion or spirituality, but also in terms of what philosopher Walter Benjamin has called aura.3 It considered the iconic in relation to the subject matter of the artworks, reception histories of the artists, and the dynamics of interaction between artwork and viewer. The exhibition showed works of artists that were also part of the Stedelijk Museum’s former characterization of iconic: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Warhol, Newman, as well as Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, and Mark Rothko. Yet, another sense of the iconic could be found in for instance photographs from Thomas Struth’s Hermitage series (2005), in which he portrayed museum visitors looking at iconic artworks on display in the Russian museum.4 Part of the Kunsthalle’s broad conceptual approach to the iconic was the method of display. Each room in the galleries showed just one work of art (or a small group of related works), to enhance a potentially intense experience between viewer and artwork. “With this show, [the curators] want[ed] to transform the museum into a place of reflection and contemplation.”5
These events at the Stedelijk Museum and Kunsthalle Bremen demonstrate different responses to the notion of the iconic. However, both center around the process of sacralization, a process which the iconic entails. This sense of sacralization became troubling for the Stedelijk Museum for being exclusionary and not allowing room for a larger picture. Kunsthalle Bremen embraced it to its full potential for its comparative potential. It also aimed for a connective dimension. This was emphasized in the exhibition design, by staging the displayed artworks in their own rooms, facilitating a one-on-one experience between artwork and viewer. The relationship between artwork and viewer was just as much part of the exhibition’s approach to the iconic, as was the symbolic power attributed to the artworks and their makers themselves. While the intention of the Stedelijk Museum might have been to move away from subscribing to a canonical approach to art history that prefers particular selections of artists over others, in doing so the museum could not deny the power it can exert over artworks when these are displayed in their halls. Curatorial work is selective work, through selection a sense of sacralization occurs. ‘Understood as a political-aesthetic practice (…), sacralization involves concrete acts of selecting, setting apart, designing, fashioning, and inscribing cultural forms as heritage.’6 Even when this process of selection works in a more inclusive, bottom-up manner, and selected artists and works are of different nature from before, still, when these works eventually are on display, they are attributed a sense of iconic – or even sacred – status. By its explicitly presented changed way of working, the Stedelijk Museum expressed the aim to expand the scope of where it might find artists and artworks worth sacralizing in their own halls. Its sacralizing power seems to be precisely the reason why the museum expanded their scope in curating and exhibiting.
1.1 Religion and the Arts
The events in the Stedelijk Museum and Kunsthalle Bremen reflect a dynamic and pluriform relationship between art and the sacred in contemporary society. It is a relationship that was actively redirected by the Stedelijk Museum, while the Kunsthalle embraced its full scope. It is a relationship that reaches far beyond these two particular institutions, into public cultural and heritage spaces at large. Since the late eighteenth-century up to the present, museums have been called the new churches7 and libraries alternatives to cathedrals.8 These sites are accompanied by concert halls, as music is regarded as potential substitute for religion.9 Such cultural public spaces, or cultural technologies as sociologist Tony Bennett called them,10 are deemed to function as sites that simultaneously monitor, educate, and elevate the people that make use of them. For its users these sites have the potential to offer a wealth of historical and contemporary artistic production, as sites of education and discovery. Due to the sacralizing power of cultural institutions, these have been easily and quickly compared with religious institutions.
This comparison between art and religion, between cultural institutions and churches often tends to go one way. It stresses how art is the new religion, how museums are the new temples. The implications of this comparison are legion. It means that artists, writers, and composers take over the roles of priests and prophets – something director Rein Wolfs of the Stedelijk Museum openly distanced himself from, by rejecting the notion of iconic artists in his future activities. It means that visitors and audiences display the same behavior as devotees and pilgrims. While in the public domain these comparisons are often easily made, academic research is still exploring what this equation between art and religion actually entails and to what extent it can move beyond these popular comparative and replacement theses. What does it mean when we say the concert hall is the new temple? Is a composer able to convey a prophetic voice in the composition process? And is concert attendance really the twenty-first-century equivalent of hiking a pilgrimage trail like the Camino to Santiago de Compostela? Two implications of the comparison between art and religion are pressing. The first is the assumption that art and religion are interchangeable, that we are talking about two of the same kind. In this formulation, they supposedly serve similar purposes and address a similar potential audience. Due to transforming societal conditions throughout modernity, the spiritual demands of this audience transformed accordingly, which religious institutions could apparently no longer fully cater for. This brings us to the second implication of the comparison: the use of the adjective new implies that religion has disappeared and has been replaced with art. Out with the old, in with the new.
Two questions follow from these implications: first, if the arts function as alternative source for religion and the spiritual in the public domain, where does this leave the beliefs, rituals, and objects of institutionalized religious traditions? These do not simply just disappear. Religious institutions possess objects that are not seldomly regarded as art and heritage, by a wide variety of cultural institutions and audiences, religious or not. This leads to the second question: what happens when art and religion encounter one another in newly created, performed, and presented practices? As the comparison between art and religion often sees art as replacement for religious practices, it tends to ignore how religion is – and has always been – imbued with artistic practices. Ever since art has become regarded as an independent entity from religion,11 it has been attributed the ability to replace religion. However, the interrelationship between the two has always existed, still does, and will continue to do so – however religious presence in societal contexts might change. Exemplary of this interrelationship is how contemporary religious sites like churches and monasteries present and display their histories, heritage, and collections in treasuries or temporary exhibitions. Religious organizations also increasingly host cultural activities, like art exhibitions, lectures, or concerts – and invite artists to make new work in response to their sites.12 It results in a view of a much more complex interrelationship between institutions of art and religion than the equation or replacement theses would have it. To move beyond the equation and replacement theses, I approach the relationship between art and religion as inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance.13 Art and religion are related, but not identical. Comparisons between practices taking place under these two terms are in order, but differences should not be ignored. Instead of looking at the accuracy of equation and replacement theses, from this perspective it becomes more valuable to look at the reasons why these theses are used at all. Why have they emerged in secularizing contexts and why does their use seem to be increasing over the past years? What is the contemporary resonance of the dynamics between art and religion?
This book is rooted in the understanding it is not a simple matter of art as secular activity (an assertion in itself that is questioned throughout this book) that replaces religion. Rather it argues for a reciprocal, resonating relationship between art and religion as sacralized forms.14 The analysis developed over the course of this book explores the interrelationship between practices of art and religion, their resonating, intertwined, and transformed manifestations in a contemporary context. A central line of argumentation is how arts and heritage allow for a continued presence of religion in secularizing societies.
This research is grounded in the study of religion, in order to explore the functions of art, with a focus on classical music, in contemporary culture. And vice versa, it looks at artistic and heritage practices in order to shed light on the place of religion in contemporary, particularly secularized, Dutch culture. To achieve this aim, I conducted research at a site that very directly deals with the interrelatedness of art, religion, and the secular. A site where these notions, and practices performed in their name, meet and merge into things anew: the annual Dutch arts festival Musica Sacra Maastricht.
1.2 Postsecular Intertwinements
Since modern time, religion is often regarded as a restrictive, repressive, or inconvenient feature in artistic practices.15 This perspective is influenced by dominant secularization narratives in which art is a separated and independent entity from religious institutions. However, modernity did not simply foster art as a site of the secular in order to replace religion. In accordance with the efforts of many colleagues in the field of art and religion, it is my aim to contribute to the ongoing work on the understanding of religion (and its related notion of spirituality) in modern and contemporary arts.16 After all, if the notion an...
