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
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