Thomas Sutcliffe: Are museums and galleries still a bathhouse for the soul?

'The "ask and ye shall receive" strategy is unlikely to work if you run a small museum'

With the official opening of the Tate Britain refurbishment this week the last piece of the Millennium Multi-piece Cultural Renaissance jig-saw is snapped into place. Typically, as with most jigsaws, it's one of the less conspicuous bits of the picture that comes last; not an unmissable bit of geometry like Foster's Great Court at the British Museum or Herzog and DeMeuron's Tate Modern, but a modest act of completion.

Out on Atterbury street, a minor echo of Tate Modern's sloping entrance will gently feed visitors into the new exhibition space and the rehung British collection. And when they're there – if they are careful – they will be able to spot a few straws in the wind about what happens now that the builders have left. There are – all of a sudden – a striking number of loans on show: pictures from the Victoria and Albert here and the National Gallery there, an entire room devoted to photographs borrowed from the Bradford Museum of Film and Photography.

Walking around the gallery with Nick Serota, the Tate's director, last week I asked what he'd had to give in return for these fairly substantial neighbourly gestures. "Nothing", he replied, "You just have to ask nicely". It struck me at the time that this "ask and ye shall receive" strategy would be unlikely to work quite as well if you ran a small museum in Clitheroe and fancied having Millais's Ophelia for a few months.

But if this pulling power raises the prospect of the Tate as a powerfully gravitational presence – able to draw in objects from anywhere in orbit around it – that's only consistent with the recent report of the Museum's taskforce which proposed that funding should be concentrated on "hub" museums, rather than scattered broadcast across the land.

This needn't be something to fear either – provided that the hubs turn out to be at the centre of something that genuinely rotates and moves forward – because a certain fluidity of motion from collection to collection is one of the most promising answers to the question of what we do now with our sparkling new spaces. The Museum Tsar, Matthew Evans was mocked a while ago when he suggested that works of art might be dispatched out into the pubs and factories – a sort of cruise missile of culture sent to track fugitive philistines. But, practical difficulties aside, he surely wasn't wrong to suggest that keeping all our treasures under a benign house-arrest was a short-cut to indifference and stagnation.

The current hangs at Tate Britain – in keeping with the principle of refreshing circulation – will change and adapt every six months or so, with some works coming out of storage, where their virtues have lain fallow, and others moving into different company.

But what will really keep this and other collections oxygenated is argument – the only really respectable justification for the movement of delicate and precious objects, and the most attractive added value a museum can offer to its visitors. Whatever else happens to museums and galleries in the next decade I would suggest that tendentious juxtapositions are going to be at the heart of their enterprise.

There really isn't much alternative in fact, because the last few years have made it plain that other models for the museum of tomorrow aren't likely to work. Whatever else a museum is, it is not a walk-through computer – as the intellectual and box-office failure of numerous experiments in interactivity have proved. If you want to look at thumbnail sized images of great paintings and read explanatory captions, then stay at home where the coffee is cheaper.

Nor can we hold to the idea any longer that a great museum is a kind of academic repository – founded for scholars and available only by grace and favour to the public who pay for it. No museum can stand without serious scholarship and no museum will stand for long if it doesn't understand that some absolutely central activities will never put bums on gallery benches. These great – and expensive – institutions do not exist to cosset the sense of superiority of scholars and hobbyists. They exist to contribute to an unfolding conversation about what we value and why.

The V&A – in its heydey was a kind of national argument too – one about cultural improvement and the almost alchemical effect of being in close proximity to artistic greatness. What was proposed was a bath-house of the soul – a municipal facility to which the public could come for spiritual ablution, departing more fragrant than they arrived. Something of that notion clearly still lingers – we don't spend all this money on museums and galleries because we believe them to be bad for people, after all. But the pungent scent of condescension, as fierce as carbolic soap in the Victorian era, has faded considerably.

Now, at least, a kind of dialogue is imagined. We'll really know the lottery money has been well spent, when all galleries pick arguments with their visitors and some of the visitors start answering back.

sutcliff@globalnet.co.uk