>>> Indianapolis Art Center <[log in to unmask]> 14/June/1996 01:15am >>> >my 2 bits: >relevance to individual = time spent But surely it is the whole point of museums to make what we offer relevant to our visitors and potential visitors. I suppose we could just shrug and leave all those wonderful museum exhibitions in cultural history and general museums in SA that ignore the fact that black people not only have a culture but a history that effects the nature of this country today. There is an interesting trend at the moment where increasingly black South African are visiting museum (this was very very unusual in the past, obviously)-not because of any special outreach programmes just because they want to. No evaluation has been done on this-as far as I now-but a school of thought is that we are seeing a change of attitude due to the existence of a new democratic government-ie we have the vote-the government is ours, therefore, the government institutions, which were previously seen as whites-only (although many museums were not) belong to all of us now. Excuse the roughness of this-these are new thought that we are playing with here. It is absolutely imperative that museums offer these new visitors something relevant to them. That is the only way they are going to visist another museum or come back to their local museum. Of course many of our potential visitors can't read (at least English or Afrikanns) so maybe this has nothing to do with lables-oops. Kathryn >