In response to Richard Rabinowitz's comments, below...
Actually, I don't see
art objects as always transcending their contexts
and human settings--not at all!  In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with the
many people on Museum-L
who have commented in the past few days that it is important to have
interpretive materials available for visitors to modern and contemporary
art museums and galleries.  My experience at my gallery is that people
appreciate being cued in to the artist's process and intentions and
having the key themes in the work pointed out. As at the Indianapolis Art
Center, we do this in a booklet accompanying the show.  This leaves the
visitors room to form
their own personal responses to individual works, but provides a starting
place for those who initially find the work puzzling. I am careful to
write them in clear, jargon-free prose.  If I must use any art historical or
theoretical terms I define them in the text or a footnote.  Meanwhile the
viewers who do have an extensive
art background--including artists and yes, art historians, too--also enjoy
reading these things.

 Richard, in your first posting on the subject, I thought you were
arguing that as long as an art object was in its original context, anyone
could go in there and immediately understand it, even without someone
there (or something to read) to help them interpret them. My response was
that no matter where that altarpiece was, in the church or in a
museum somewhere, people from outside that culture were going to need
more information to really grasp its meaning in more than a superficial
way. It sounds like you thought I was also implying that the experience of
seeing it in use as part of an actual shrine was no
different from seeing it in an art museum. I'm not. Meanwhile, I see from
the response below that you and I agree about the necessity of providing
interpretive materials and a variety of ways for visitors to connect what
they're seeing with their own lives and experiences.  You have some
exhibit ideas there that I'd be interested in seeing.


Helen Glazer, Exhibitions Director
Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland
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On Thu, 30 Nov 1995, Richard Rabinowitz wrote:

> I appreciate Helen Glazer's thoughtful response to my posting about perfect
> exhibits vs. perfect labels.  Nothing I can now add could bridge the obviously
> great gulf between us in defining such terms as art, exhibit, interpretation,
> museums, perhaps even religion.  I look at the museumization of select
> objects as a historical, social, and intellectual process which inevitably
> changes those objects.  One may compare their physical contexts in church
> vs. museum, but also (I tried to say) in the narratives that people use to
> describe their encounters with such objects.  Perhaps Ms. Glazer sees art
> objects as always transcending their contexts and human settings -- that is
> certainly a basic tenet of much excellent art historical scholarship, and I
> won't take issue with it here.
>
> I do, however, take exception to Ms. Glazer's accusation that I was being
> "patronizing to visitors who don't come to the museum with the same
> background information that museum curators and scholars might take
> for granted."  As my last sentence indicated, I want museums to respect
> visitors more than they now do, to take their visitors' prior experience more
> and not less seriously.  Indeed, visitors may not know the same things that
> curators know; most museums, in fact, don't have a clue to what their
> visitors come knowing, nor do they much care.  They measure visitors
> entirely by the knowledge that curators have.
>
> Ms. Glazer's example of her children's religious education is a perfect case
> of what I mean.  I would love it if museums of Judaica aimed to construct
> their object-interpretations as bridges to connect her children's experience
> with that of Jews of another time and culture.  In many years of visiting
> and working on Jewish museums, I've seen slim evidence of that.  Does
> anyone know of a museum of Renaissance paintings whose labels speak to
> the religious experience of 15th- or 16th-century worshippers, even insofar
> as that experience involved an interaction with these holy objects?  Indeed,
> can one find a guidebook or an exhibit about Protestant churches that aims
> to explain its physical appearance as a religious, rather than an art or
> architectural historical phenomenon?
>
> (I can think of one brilliant exception, which helps prove the rule.  That is
> Kings College Chapel, in Cambridge, England, where a brilliant
> interpretive exhibit begins by showing how the Tudor building was and is
> "about God."  I recommend it as a extraordinary and moving experience.)
>
> But my larger point is that museums too seldom heed whatever knowledge
> it is that visitors bring -- whether that is religious, or technical, or polit
ic
> al,
> or cultural, or whatever.  Instead we yammer at them incessantly, often of
> recondite concepts that have no meaning or relevance to them.  We often
> speak eloquently of "interactive" exhibits, by which we often mean gadgets
> to give visitors even more of this yammering by interacting with their
> fingertips.  But we don't listen enough to visitors.  We don't understand that
> the most perfect labels are those that visitors "write" while and after they
> have been stimulated to thought or moved to feeling by visiting with us.
>
> Far from denying the value of interpretation, I want curators to design
> their interpretive efforts to be more attentive to the strengths and
> weaknesses that visitors bring with them.  To do this, curators will need to
> know more about the 16th century than they now do, and much more about
> the 20th century.  They should indeed know what saints meant to 16th-
> century Italian Catholics, but also how different is the Protestant notion of
> saintliness ("a congregation of saints") or our contemporary notions of "a
> holy person."  They might do this better if they saw their work as a dialogue
> with contemporary visitors, rather than an effort to make visitors into art
> historians.
>
> Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]