Gothic: a thoroughly modern art form

From Venice's spooky pavilions to the ICA's talks on terror, the shadows of this 18th-century art form are creeping up everywhere
The pasticcio, a carved pillar in a courtyard at Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Eerily illuminated ... the carved pillar in a courtyard at Sir John Soane's Museum. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Gothic is the original modern art style. In 18th-century Britain, a market was born in both fiction and art – including printed, popular art by the likes of Hogarth and Gillray, and one of the strangest fruits of this new consumable middle-class culture was a vogue for medievalist horror. From novels such as The Monk to whimsical architectural creations such as Sir John Soane's Museum, the gothic revelled in the macabre, delighted in the depraved, and (here lies its modernity) treated art itself as a kind of fictional construct, a labyrinthine realm of mental play.

The quintessential gothic creation is, for me, the Monk's Parlour in Soane's Museum, where eerie filtered light, sepulchral shadows and a skull create the perfect mood for reading tales of terror. Here reading is imagined as an escape, and the architecture mirrors the liberty of the reader: by implication, a perfect library might be full of rooms designed for different genres of fiction (a Jane Austen room, done out like a Bath drawing room, perhaps?).

Gothic, which in the 18th-century was so self-conscious, and so liberating for the modern mind (it is no coincidence that it was contemporary with the French Revolution), is being revived again in art. If you look around the best art of today, exquisite gothic shadows are everywhere. One of the most memorable moments in Mike Nelson's fantastic warren of invented rooms at the 54th Venice Biennale is when you climb a rickety staircase into a low domed chamber pervaded by yellow light: this spooky glow is created by a coloured skylight, and the effect is identical to the way Soane used such colour filters in his otherworldly museum-house and his Dulwich mausoleum.

Nelson's use of fictional architecture to tell stories and beguile the imagination is pure Soanean gothic. Yet Nelson is not the only gothic artist in Venice. The German Pavilion is as scary as hell, with its perverse paraphernalia of religion turned bad and an artist who knew he was dying when he took on the commission, and as for a man who is a human candle ... how gothic is that?

The ICA, as it happens, is exploring the new gothic in art and culture in a weekend of talks and events called Template for Terror. I will be in a panel discussion about gothic art there on Sunday, and if I were not already convinced that an 18th-century notion offers insights into the art of today, Mike Nelson's weird light makes it seem that gothic is indeed the art term of the moment.