Museums: bland, academic and failing to speak to our souls?

Alain de Botton's A Point of View (broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at the weekend, with full text published on the website) took on museums this week. His argument was that while museums might be thought of as fulfilling some of the functions of churches in the modern world, they fall short in certain ways. "While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem incapable of adequately linking these objects to the needs of our souls," he writes.

He continues:

I try to imagine what would happen if modern secular museums took the example of churches more seriously. What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose - to make us good and wise and kind - and tried to use the art in their collections to prompt us to be so?

What if they gave up on the neutral, bland captions they tend to use and put beneath each picture a really directive set of commands telling us, for example, "look at this image and remember to be patient". Or "use this sculpture to meditate on what you too could do to bring about a fairer world".

This is an unfashionable view, perhaps, but I am of the opinion that museums are first and foremost places of scholarship and learning. Not of "learning" simple (fatuous?) moral lessons such as "remember to be patient"; but of learning the way the world fits together and the place of objects within the world. In fact, were I presented with a museum label that exhorted me to bring about a better world or remember to be patient, I might well start setting about the glass case with my umbrella, which would neither be good nor kind nor wise.

De Botton is in the grip of an intellectual confusion. He praises churches and religious art, but the best kind of religious art tells us nothing explicitly; but, rather, is multivalent and ambiguous. Look at one of the great Caravaggios – his Flagellation, for example, in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Does it give us a simple moral message, or even a handful of moral messages, that say things like, "avoid violence"; "bear pain patiently"; "following orders is no excuse"? Does it heck. Reducing a work like this to a set of exhortations is to commit a kind of violence upon it. Which is not to say that we might not be changed in some way by looking at a work of art; that we might not, to drag in Aristotle, experience pity and fear.

The best museums – or rather, the ones I love the best – do indeed have "bland" labels. A label that tells one where and when an object was made, with some more or less brief illustration of its purpose and place in the world, which will also be illuminated by the context in which it has been placed by the curator. It probably will not accompanied by a screen, a hologram, a recording of voices or a costumed interpreter, which I know flies in the face of a lot of modern museology, but there it is, that's just boring old me.

This isn't to say that one will not have an emotional, indeed spiritual reaction in the presence of extraordinary objects in a museum. To pluck something more or less at random, the last time I was in the Roman galleries of the Museum of London, I almost wept seeing a pathetic, deeply unbeautiful, wildly unimpressive fragment of bay leaf: a bay leaf that had been found buried with a girl interred in a cemetary in Spitalfields in the 4th century AD.

What I didn't want, or need, was a label saying: "Consider the impermanence of things" in order to "bring on" a set of emotional or spirtitual or moral reflections. Objects act on us in curious and unpredictable ways. Forcing the issue will do their claims no good at all.