COMMENT A DEFICIENCY IN LIVED DIVINITY IN FRAMING BRITISH ART For the better part of a year, public museums and art galleries have been ghostly, empty shells. The public collections of art are archived in stasis on the very walls they were installed upon for display ...
Since the 2000’s, flexing to various political trends and the consequential injections/cuts to public spending in the arts, our public collections and the art sector have attempted to identify themselves as ‘essential’ in numerous ways: the arts are essential to wellbeing, essential to community building, essential to society; our museums and galleries are civic spaces where all should be represented. Yet, since we entered a pandemic polity in which decisions about what remains open and what is forced to close rests on the assessment of what is ‘essential’, they have been closed. Shut for the better part of 2020, public art museums are now pushed to the back of the queue. In England for instance, they are classed alongside saunas and after non-essential retail in their right to reopen in 2021. I have been observing the strife dealt to the art museum alongside the way places of worship have been treated and have responded since the start of the pandemic1. Their services never slowed down despite the buildings being closed in the first lockdown. In fact, faith communities increased activity in many instances2. By the end of the year, as we entered the second national lockdown, See Hassan Vawda, ‘Museums must go further if they want to be seen as “temples of the secular”’, Museums Journal. https://www. museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/ opinion/2020/06/01062020-museums-gofurther-temples-of-the-secular/. Published June 1, 2020. Accessed December 28, 2020; Hassan Vawda, ‘Closed Museums, Open Churches: what is essential in a pandemic?’ Religion and Collections blog. https://religioncollections. wordpress.com/2021/03/06/closed-museumsopen-churches-what-is-essential-in-apandemic/. Published March 6, 2021. Accessed March 26, 2021.
Rasheed Araeen, Bismullah 1988. Tate T06986 © Rasheed Araeen
1
All-Party Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society. Keeping the Faith: Partnerships between Faith Groups and Local Authorities during and beyond the Pandemic (2020). 2
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