I don't favor framing the visitor/curator issue as a conflict between the
parties but there are definitely legitimate forces in conflict in the
museum context. Peter Rebernik's remarks are quite on point.  Here's a
vignette:

When I was working as an architectural consultant for a major art museum, I
did a fair amount of research on visitors and their wants and needs.  For
the most part, the curatorial staff thought this research was pointless and
wasteful.

One thing I found was that people wanted a place to sit as they walked
around.  I made a map of the museum coloring galleries with upholstered
seating green, any seating light green, no seating pink, and no seating but
chairs, etc. on display as objects, bright red.  As it happened, the entire
quarter-mile long sequence of decorative arts galleries came up bright red.
 At a senior staff meeting I showed these maps and we had some discussion
of whether any seating could be provided that wouldn't conflict with the
exhibited collection objects.  After a half-hour of this, the curator in
charge of the department, who was a smart guy and meant well, blurted out
"...I don't understand why we're spending all this time on this.  I don't
have to sit down in the galleries; if I want to sit down, I just go to my
office."

Art museums especially, science museums to a much lesser extent, do not
have a culture that regards what happens inside the head of a visitor
engaging with a work of art as worthy of serious intellectual
investigation.  Inside the head of a colleague in the same field, reading
your journal article, yes. But otherwise attention is directed to the
object qua object and in a context of other objects. Indicators of the
problem: hostility to long labels that detract from the visual setting,
reluctance to give educational staff use of precious objects (in a science
museum with a drawer full of shrew skeletons, it's easier to do this),
untested and inadequate signs and maps, etc. Curatorial conversation about
collections is erudite, interesting, complicated, and animated.  Curatorial
conversation about the visitor and his experience in the museum is limp,
uninformed, and short.

The peer review structure of professional advancement has a lot to do with
this, I'm sure. The conflict is much less in evidence in 'industries' that
are customer-oriented (like, say, Toyota) rather than peer-oriented (GM in
the seventies was directed by GM executives' evaluations of each other).
An analogy can be drawn with teaching and research in universities.