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 [log in to unmask] 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]