Allison,

You really do seem to be putting yourself down!  Presumably you are a museum
educator because you have a deep understanding and appreciation of your
field coupled with a strong desire to communicate and the training and
experience to do so.  Many curators lack the communication drive, and it
shows in what they write - which is why so many museums now have print media
departments to try and translate academese into meaningful communication for
visitors.

I can't agree that reading the texts makes it harder to translate ideas -
basically its a knack, and the principal difficulty is with writers who are
not actually interested in communication, but more in the verbal barbed wire
of insider jargon that serves to establish an intellectual territorial
imperative (like a dog pissing on a fence).  Part of the educators job is
cutting through the obfuscation.

Also, why should it worry you if your responses to an art work are not
identical with those of a critic?  Is there only one permissible
interpretation?  I think not.  Your own is just as likely to be interesting
and valid, and if you communicate to your audience that there are always
many possible responses, you encourage them further in having their own.
 Who wants to look at art through other people's spectacles all the time?

Someone once defined an expert as 'Anyone more than 100 miles from home with
a box of slides'.  You should try it.   (And keep reading the texts, it
helps develop your own critical faculties.)

Heleanor Feltham
Powerhouse Museum

 ----------
From: owner-museum-l
To: MUSEUM-L
Subject: curators vs. educational texts
Date: Tuesday, 6 October 1998 4:11PM

I'd like to know your opinion on the process of writing an educational
text for art museums.

I think that reading the art history books and/or curatorial texts
first, makes it harder later on to translate those ideas, with a
simplified language, into educational material. How about us (museum
educators) analysing by ourselves the work of art first, jotting down
our impressions, and trying to write meaningful and understandable
material (be it for kids, teens or adults), and afterwards comparing it
with the critic's text to see if the essential ideas are the same?

Do you think that as museum educators our vision and appreciation of a
work of art would be limited in comparison with that of the expert, and
therefore this procedure would be counterproductive?

Allison Pomenta
Curator of Educational Exhibits
Museo de Bellas Artes
Caracas, Venezuela

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