Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 173

Tate Modern is the exemplar of the contemporary global art museum. It has been critiqued for catering to corporate forces and building a monumental cathedral out of an old industrial space. While acknowledging this critique, the ���� Tate Modern: The Handbook asserts: “as compared to the agreed stories and hierarchies of Christianity or Islam, Tate Modern offers puzzles, questions and dilemmas” (Marr ����:��). A paragraph later, the author notes: “So this is a bogus cathedral whose worshippers disagree about basic tenets of the faith.” Tate Modern “performance” is self-assertively global and secular if not universal, even if it contains puzzles, questions, and dilemmas. The latter often include a display of the unique which, in the last �� years, has celebrated cultural identities. Julian Stallabrass (����) locates the tension between the universal and the particular in the evolving march of cosmopolitanism in sites such as the many arts biennales around the world: “The general art-world view of this development is sanguine: the linear, singular, white, and masculine principles of modernism have finally fallen, to be replaced by a multiple, diverse, rainbow-hued, fractally complex proliferation of practices and discourses” (p. ��). Nevertheless, these biennales “address the cosmopolitan art audience rather than the local population” (p. ��). Tate Modern and the biennales with their resolution through universal cosmopolitan values leave open possibilities for violence from the very identities they represent. They are, in fact, not resolved. They remain puzzles, questions, and dilemmas. Similarly, the Edinburgh International Festival welcomes the world and has over time accommodated many tensions in favor of a universal cosmopolitanism, which is now threatened by many local rebellions. An important moment in the art world after the United Kingdom’s ���� Brexit vote came from Martin Roth, the German director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who resigned. In an interview, Roth explained: “What happened to tolerance, solidarity and charity? And I’m not a dreamer. I’m just talking about basic values—manners that are part of our upbringing and connect us. Where are they now?” (Brown ����). Despite the accommodations and internal critiques, universal values are confronted with local and particular ones—from new and old identities such as working class whites in the Western world, or fundamentalist religious ideologies the world over. This “miniaturization of human beings,” as Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (����) terms the emerging identities, is 172