To Timbuktu, and beyond, The Guardian

Critics have declared it clumsy, misguided and even racist. But, argues Jonathan Jones, Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly is quite simply thrilling.
Captain Cook was impressed by the art he saw in the Pacific. Power and Taboo, an exhibition at the British Museum of sacred objects from the Polynesian Islands, includes stupendous things brought back from his voyages - that is, by the first Europeans to make contact with the peoples of these islands. Among them is a wooden bowl supported by the arms of two figures with big round eyes. It's probably the artefact Cook describes with his brand of cool approval in his journal: "A large cava bowl ... neither ill designed nor executed."

Ever since Europeans started to visit - then with brutal rapidity conquer - places across the oceans in the 15th century, they have been struck by the carved, painted, cast, woven and embroidered objects travellers brought home. But here is a terrible irony. The very contact with Europeans that destroyed so many cultures, through violence, disease and, most lethally of all, the assault on traditional beliefs by Christian missionaries, also created the collections of premodern non-western art that today are the best resources for appreciating and trying to understand them.

This creates endless controversies, as the British Museum itself can attest. This year, though, it has been able to relax. The flak has been drawn across the channel. No recent event in the world of museums has been as bitterly contested as the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly, the new French museum of "the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas", which opened in Paris this summer. Such has been the criticism of this museum that a comment piece in the Guardian compared it to the Millennium Dome.

It was Jacques Chirac's personal plan to rehouse the French national collection of ethnographic art. In the eyes of radical critics, however, the project has been clumsy at best, racist at worst, reinforcing antiquated colonial prejudices. The museum's planners made a mistake when they described its contents as "arts premiers" - first arts, a phrase critics denounced as scarcely better than the defunct "primitive art". At exactly the moment when African curators like Simon Njami - founder of the magazine Revue Noir and curator of last year's exhibition Africa Remix in London and Paris - insist on the contemporaneity and urbanity of African art, here is a museum, basically, of masks and drums.

Now it has opened an exhibition that is a riposte, or sop, to its critics. D'un Regard l'Autre is about exactly what critics accuse the museum of crudely celebrating: the western gaze. I went to see it with some trepidation, wondering if I'd be the only person in the museum. At least I'd have plenty of space to be angry in.

I realised that news of this place has been distorted in traversing the immense cultural distance between Paris and London, as soon as I entered the jungly park over which the museum floats on bulbous legs. You queue underneath to get inside. That's right, queue. I had to compete with la toute Paris for a ticket. The excitement and eagerness can only be compared to Tate Modern - Jean Nouvel's spectacular organic building is Paris's answer to London's modern art museum - except it exhibits the antithesis of modern industrial life.

You go up a circular ramp around a transparent tower loaded with drums, to emerge into a flowing space that lets you wander from one world culture to another. The display is completely open and connected: a single stroll leads from Oceania to Africa to the Americas. Alcoves contain treasures: Ethiopian wall paintings are presented in a chapel of meditative quietness; another refuge has literary fragments from Timbuktu. It's not hard to criticise. Why imply that a small selection of works from village cultures in Asia reflects the whole of Asian art history? Why assume, in publications, a western visitor? Should we even call these objects art? Yet none of this carping seems relevant to the stunning fact of this exhilarating museum.

No other European government - least of all ours - has spent money on this scale to display what this museum rightly calls "masterpieces" of premodern global art. And what is so great about the British Museum's approach anyway? I find the Wellcome Trust Gallery, where artefacts from all over the world illustrate topics such as "respecting animals" and "coping with death", truly annoying: objects are not treated as works of art, but as part of social life. Which they are of course, but the elusive relationship of art to society is patronisingly simplified. Some of us go to the doctor, some to the shaman - it's all supposed to be perfectly logical. This rationalist social worker's anthropology is woefully inadequate in looking at works of art from any culture.

The Musée du Quai Branly takes the opposite approach. It doesn't explain much at all, but shows art - which it simply and rightly declares to be art - in dramatic, spectacular vistas, intimate close-ups, poetic juxtapositions. It's one of the most seductive museum displays I've ever seen. Its aim is to excite people about this art, to free it from dusty cases in neglected corners of museums, and make you want to see more. It is a triumph, all the braver for defying cliches of post colonial cultural studies.

The funniest thing is critics' belief that a French museum would be intellectually naive. This from the French, the inventors of structuralism? Quai Branly has American masks that come from the collection of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology; far from being unthinking, its flowing display surely reflects his writing on art. In a famous essay, Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America, Lévi-Strauss identifies formal similarities between art unconnected in time or space; it is one of the steps on the road to his theory of a universal structure of human thought. The way this museum invites comparison between cultures - why are masks universal? - resembles the big questions asked by Lévi-Strauss, yet its belief in the mystery of art goes back further.

In the exhibition D'un Regard l'Autre you can see how the Parisian avant-garde fell in love with "the primitive" 100 years ago. Here is a mask made by the Fang people in west-central Africa that was owned by the artist André Derain, who showed it to Matisse and Picasso; according to Derain it was the first time either of them "got" African art. The similarity between the great almond-shaped mask and the masked women in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is unmissable. Also here is a New Hebridean figure that Matisse gave to Picasso.

The exhibition takes us back further still. It shows how Europeans collected artefacts from Africa and the Americas, even in the Renaissance. Cabinets of curiosities - those Renaissance ancestors of museums - were full of exotic objects to wonder at; you could argue the Musée du Branly returns to this spirit of amazement.

Back in London, I am looking at A'a, a wooden image of the creator from the island Rurutu. There's a photograph nearby of Picasso next to his bronze cast of this work in the British Museum collection, yet here it's hard to recapture the excitement Europeans once felt for such art. There seems to be a choice, in displaying global art, between cautious introspection and full-throttle spectacle. The British Museum is too diplomatic and, as a result, Power and Taboo is scarcely one of the hot exhibitions in London. A reasonable number of people stroll about. In Paris, they're going mad for the art of elsewhere. And if they're not using the correct language, who cares?