OT long ago, a genial, soft-spoken museum curator, who will remain anonymous for obvious reasons, was talking over lunch about the National Museum in Nairobi. Corrupt officials in Kenya, he said, had used the museum to seize private property, asserting that the lands held archaeological remains that belonged in the museum; then the officials or their cronies built houses for themselves or used the property for commercial development.

Ramon Lerma was listening to this and described his situation working as an assistant curator at a small museum of modern Filipino art in Quezon City, the Ateneo Art Gallery, the first museum of modern art in the Philippines. His problem is raising money in a country where, he said, 70 percent of the population barely scrape together one meal a day. He wondered, What is the argument for raising money for art as opposed to food?

The occasion was a meeting in Austria of about 70 people, mostly curators and museum directors, from nearly 35 countries. The topic: museums in the 21st century. The organization: a think tank called the Salzburg Seminar, founded by Harvardians during the cold war, no doubt with help from the C.I.A., but now run independently, mostly for political and economic conferences but occasionally for cultural discussions. It is housed at the paradisiacal Schloss Leopoldskron, the estate owned by Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theater director and founder of the Salzburg Festival. More famously, the schloss is where "The Sound of Music" was filmed.

Museums, it was presumed by everybody there, have never been more important, and in a way that is true. They haven't. But they are also suffering an identity crisis, and not just because "museum," like "school" or "corporation," now encompasses a universe of places so different in size, budget and orientation that it's hard to say what links them. The usual phrase today is secular cathedral: they have become cathedrals for a secular culture, storehouses of collective values and diverse histories, places where increasingly we seem to want to spend our free time and thrash out big issues (the religious debate over "Sensation" in Brooklyn, the atomic bomb argument at the Smithsonian, multiculturalism, taxes and public morality). We put our faith in few traditional institutions these days, but the museum is still one of them.

Its purview extends beyond objects to ideas. The Tenement Museum in New York, the Robben Island Museum in South Africa, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Jewish Museum in Berlin: it hardly matters what they contain, if anything. They are our new theaters of conscience, memorials to suffering, choreographed places of ritual genuflection, where we go to contemplate our fallibility and maybe even weep a little while admiring the architecture. They offer packaged units of morality, unimpeachable and guiltlessly entertaining. They presume to bring us together, physically and spiritually.

Togetherness is a fresh concept in the museum world. Museums were conceived in the 19th century as places to improve public taste, to educate the middle classes. Self- improvement and commerce went hand in hand in the early history of museums, especially in the United States and Britain. According to the liberal Victorian social ideal, museums cultivated good citizens who would then share in the general prosperity of a properly functioning democracy. Enlightened citizens became acquisitive participants in a flush economy. Museums served the public good, in other words, which meant they were good for society and, in the process, good for business.

But they were never places of consensus. When the Smithsonian got itself in hot water a few years ago over an exhibition about the Enola Gay, it faced a new situation: a public divided over the atomic bomb, with the museum expected to mediate the debate. The old top-down view of museums, whereby curators and scholars dictated to a passive audience through tendentious displays, had somehow given way to the notion of a democratized museum. What the Smithsonian presented in its exhibitions was now supposed to represent a consensus view, an absurdity but a widespread presumption.

When people talk today about democratized museums, they don't just mean more popular shows and more access to the collections. They mean that museums are expected to practice collective bargaining over civic priorities — or else they must face the consequences. Brooklyn, having failed to do so with "Sensation," suffered, if not at the box office then in terms of public relations, first for offending some Roman Catholics, then for seeming to pander to a rich collector who owned the works. Never mind that other museums pander all the time. Marc Pachter, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, pointed out at the seminar how people complain about "Sensation" and about history at the Smithsonian but, being quixotic, not about natural history museums, where biodiversity, natural selection and the greenhouse effect are taken for granted. Still, the expectation of public accountability prevails.

Democratization is what the political left long argued for at museums: down with elitism, question authority. Cultural theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, starting in the 1960's, supported this argument, casting doubts on the benevolence of a range of institutions previously viewed as benign and progressive: hospitals, universities and libraries as well as museums. These institutions came to be viewed as disciplinary enforcers in class and race wars.

This was an especially big switch for museums. As Neil Harris, an American historian of museums, put it in an article in the journal Daedalus not long ago: "The exaggerated tirades of an earlier day, created by those who persistently labeled museums morgues, mausoleums and charnel houses, institutions dead to the world around them," gave way to "assignments of responsibility for sustaining the class structure, spreading racism and protecting the canonized narratives of Western civilization."

Sensitive to these new, almost flattering attacks, museums felt compelled to deconstruct some of their authority by acknowledging the fallibility of their own curatorial decisions — that should have been obvious to everyone anyway — and gradually authority became equivocal.