Museums and modernism

~oldben

I watched 'Night at the Museum' with my family recently: a good adventure movie, not bad for my eldest, aged ten, but not able to hold the attention of my youngest, who is six.

It made me think of the museum of my past, the Melbourne Museum when it was still located with the State Library of Victoria. This is a beautiful, neoclassical building, first opened in the 1850s, with a domed reading room reminiscent of the British Museum Reading Room added in 1913. I loved to visit as a child, and as a teenager I made trips to the city to research assignments in the library.

But at some point the museum, which had been a matter of gallery halls filled with stuffed animals, rocks, and occasional exhibitions full of things like Egyptian sarcophagi, got replaced with an institutional modernist building that felt more about everyday life, working-class culture rather than high, plaques and narrative and multimedia rather than objects. And it developed a focus on Indigenous culture, which never grabbed me. The new place simply isn't somewhere I feel compelled to visit.

I realized that this might not be entirely about the way that the ideologies driving the museum have changed. Or perhaps in ways that are less obvious. In particular, it's about the space. The new exhibition halls are cavernous and featureless, 'spaces' like you'd find at the (perhaps related?) exhibition centre down by the docks. Both were built in the same era and replaced Victorian-era places. The old places had decoration, grandeur, and to an extent 'rooms' rather than 'spaces'. The new ones are utilitarian and unornamented. There's a boldness to their execution, maybe, but little romance or beauty. Likely, those were not concerns.

I'm very against modernism. I have seldom personally enjoyed it (a marker of rightly ordered aesthetic preferences, I would argue). Beyond that, I've come to see it as an expression of what I call 'the Satanic ideology'. Think of that metaphorically, if you prefer. The 'make it new' idea associated with Ezra Pound typically forgets to ask whether the new is beautiful or good. Or perhaps it simply gives it the finger. The essence of the Satanic ideology is rebellion against the good, which Christians and Platonists identify with God. Augustine is one writer to have conveyed the notion that evil is privation of the good; the relevant passages in 'City of God' left me considering the terrifying image of one who simply turns their back on God (or the good) and walks endlessly away from life, truth, beauty, health, and all those attributes of God.

the true cause of the blessedness of the good angels is found to be

this, that they cleave to Him who supremely is. And if we ask the

cause of the misery of the bad, it occurs to us, and not

unreasonably, that they are miserable because they have forsaken Him

who supremely is, and have turned to themselves who have no such

essence. And this vice, what else is it called than pride?

(Augustine, 'City of God', book 12, ch. 6)

Modernism leaves the good we inherit from the past, and instead embraces the will to be self-made:

We know no time when we were not as now;

Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised

By our own quickening power...

(Satan in Milton, 'Paradise Lost', book V)

It's an image of much in our culture: a perhaps unwitting embrace of disorder, ugliness, and ultimately even death, that can begin with ideas like 'I can do better than God', or 'there is no natural law (and no natural rights, but only the law made and the rights bestowed by the state)'.

I think we ought to reject modernism. We should seek the good, not the new.