Duane Hanson, Tourists, 1988 (Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida).
Giorgio Agamben writes:
Thus, in the Museum, the analogy between capitalism and religion becomes clear. The Museum occupies exactly the space and function once reserved for the Temple as the place of sacrifice. To the faithful in the Temple - the pilgrims who would travel across the earth from temple to temple, from sanctuary to sanctuary - correspond today the tourists who restlessly travel in a world that has been abstracted into a Museum. But while the faithful and the pilgrims ultimately participated in a sacrifice that reestablished the right relationships between the divine and the human by moving the victim into the sacred sphere, the tourists celebrate on themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the anguishing experience of the destruction of all possible use. If the Christians were “pilgrims,” that is, strangers on the earth, because their homeland was in heaven, the adepts of the new capitalist cult have no homeland because they dwell in the pure form of separation. Wherever they go, they find pushed to the extreme the same impossibility of dwelling that they knew in their houses and their cities, the same inability to use that they experienced in supermarkets, in malls, and on television shows. For this reason, insofar as it represents the cult and central altar of the capitalist religion, tourism is the primary industry in the world, involving more than six hundred and fifty million people each year. Nothing is so astonishing as the fact that millions of ordinary people are able to carry out on their own flesh what is perhaps the most desperate experience that one can have: the irrevocable loss of use, the absolute impossibility of profaning.
