Well, I'm going to try a troglodyte approach, just out of
          sheer contrariness.
 
          As an overall nostrum, I would suggest:"Beware popular
          ideas". Two popular ideas that have gained currency among
          museum people are: 1) Museums are "authoritarian" or
          "pater/maternalistic" (a wonderfully careful neologism) in
          the way information is presented. A recent posting compares
          that to the issue of authorial omniscience in literature,
          and I would add the issue of illusion in art altogether. In
          both literature and visual arts (not in such a pronounced
          fashion in music, interestingly enough) artists and
          critics have tried to dethrone the creator, associating that
          demotion with a democratic spirit. This is a tremendously
          untested idea among the people who are to participate in
          this democracy. People in general notoriously prefer
          narrative stories and representational pictures. So as
          admirable as the concept may be, it serves the artists and
          the critics, not the audiences, by and large. (We're museum
          people, how do you think that the public would respond to
          carefully framed questions about narrative and
          representation?)
 
          I would extrapolate this to the latest thinking in museology
          that is being expressed in this thread. Do *visitors*
          experience curatorship as condescension? Or do they relish a
          good narrative thread running through an exhibition,
          explaining context and craft from an expert point of view? I
          have no doubt that museums have been improved by a greater
          attention to the meanings that their visitors invest in
          objects, but I would also suggest that expertise is what
          museums have to offer, and it should not be slighted as
          anti-democratic, or disparaged as paternalistic.
 
          The second popular notion that I think bears careful
          questioning is the use of computers in exhibition. I am
          *very* computer literate, and have used computers to compose
          music professionally, and use them all the time at work, and
          frequently at home. Here we descend into the strictly
          personal. I have yet to see exhibition information presented
          on a computer that is not flat, dimensionless, limited by
          poor resolution graphics, small screens and tinny sound.
          Isn't one of the great things about a museum the aura around
          a real object? The aura of authenticity, the aesthetics of
          the thing itself? I'm not just questioning the quality of
          museum computer graphics, I'm questioning the use of
          computers as exhibit displays altogether. For me, they have
          the quality of going to a museum to see paintings and seeing
          reproductions instead.
 
          I am certainly being extreme here, and verging on flaming.
          But whenever I read opinions that are so clearly shaped by a
          particular period's prejudices, my mind immediately goes
          into contrarian overdrive. There is no doubt that computers
          are beautiful devices for retrieving information. But they
          are a *terrible* replacement for the personal encounters
          with objects that have made museums such attractions for
          centuries.
 
          Eric
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