Mind your language

With the sums of public money now invested in museums, no one can really argue that they should be the preserve of the cultured classes.

But although the case for accessibility no longer needs making, the double “D” phrase – “dumbing down” – still casts a shadow. How can museums engage with a wider public without selling their connoisseurship short?

A lot of this hinges on their use of language. In the old days, curators writing museum labels were often talking among themselves. If they were worried about whether their public understood, they had no way of checking.

Market research has changed all that, enabling museums to find out who their visitors are and how much they know.

Curators working on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Medieval and Renaissance Galleries were shocked to discover how little their focus groups knew about the medieval period and Christianity, but they were able to adjust their language accordingly (although terms such as “Reformation” are unexplained).

“If you’re familiar with your collections, you can easily assume that a simple description will do,” says Oliver Green, the former head curator of the London Transport Museum.

During the museum’s redisplay as part of its £22.4m redevelopment in 2007, a text panel on the introduction of trolley buses had to be rewritten after it emerged that most of the group it was tested on had no idea what a trolley bus was.

A conversational tone

Finding a language most people understand is relatively straightforward; finding one everyone feels comfortable with is much trickier.

Research by Paulette McManus, a lecturer in communication at University College London, used by Glasgow Museums has shown that visitors walking round a museum in company tend to treat the labels as a third party in their conversation and engage with them as a personification of the museum. If the personification seems friendly, the conversation flows.

On the evidence of the huge number of visitors to Kelvingrove, its personification is a success with the public, but critics have accused it of dumbing down.

Some have complained of over-interpretation – citing a label speculating on whether Cézanne painted a still life because it was raining – but the main problem seems to be one of tone rather than content. One museum professional felt that it was “patronising, evangelistic and happy-clappy”.

“A lot of it is about what linguists call ‘language registers’: about the degree of formality of the language,” says Glasgow Culture and Sport’s director of research Mark O’Neill.

“Kelvingrove’s use of everyday language feels as if there is less information to some who are experts. It’s not about the content, it’s about the language making people feel they belong. We thought the more knowledgeable visitors would accept the everyday language, but some people feel it is not reverential enough.”

Issues of reverence and accessibility tend to come to a head in art galleries, where specialist language poses added problems. A survey by Tate Britain found that few people could explain the term “modernism” – no surprise, when even the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Art struggles to define it.

But do audiences want to be greeted at an exhibition entrance with a lengthy definition? Do we need definitions to enjoy art? Not necessarily, thinks Tate Britain’s head of education Felicity Allen.

“One has to decide whom one is aiming at with different exhibitions and, if people aren’t familiar with terms, give them the opportunity to find out.”

She points out that Tate exhibitions are always accompanied by educational courses and there is a glossary of art terms on the museum website.

More important, perhaps, than defining art-historical terms is setting art movements in historical context. The text for Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, the V&A’s 2006 exhibition, gave modernism a human face by emphasising the movement’s aspiration to make the world a better place.

“Talking to a different audience can require a change not just of tone but of emphasis,” says Lucy Harland, a former curator who advises museums on communication. “Which part of the story do you decide to tell?”

Curators are sometimes too close to the story to judge. “You need someone who can be the voice of the average visitor, someone who can help you stand back and ask: ‘What’s the point we’re trying to make?’” Harland says.

That person can be a scriptwriter such as Mark Kilfoyle, who was brought in to edit the labels for the London Transport Museum.

“Curators are often brilliant at talking about things,” Kilfoyle says, “but when you give them a pen they write in a high style.”

An experienced editor can put a curator’s point in simple English without losing the complexity of the idea or, ideally, the author’s voice. At the V&A, in-house interpretation editor Lucy Trench tries not to wipe out individual voices.

“Some are very lively,” she says. “One thing that’s difficult for an editor to do is to inject life – life has to come from the person who has written it.”

There is always a danger that, on its editorial journey through different departments, a label may lose connection with its object – Trench checks the finished version against the original to ensure that the meaning has been preserved.

For the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, authorial responsibility had to be clearly demarcated. As the objects came from different parts of the museum the departmental curators “owned” the objects, while curators working on the different topics – nominated as “subject parents” – owned the displays and accompanying text.

Today, when even the mass media increasingly target their audiences, museums continue to face the difficult challenge of addressing a general audience. Layering information is one solution to the problem, but it takes up space.

The temptation is to dump all the information that’s too complicated for labels onto computers, but it should be resisted, warns Mark O’Neill. “Computers are not a good way of presenting text – they’re about interaction.”

At the Natural History Museum, senior interpretation developer Alex Gaffikin agrees. For the 2007 family exhibition Ice Station Antarctica, the museum’s interpretation team commissioned a computer game with a skidoo ride that gave players a sense of the topography while dispensing nuggets of information.

They also tried more low-tech methods of disguising text, such as hiding a diary in a drawer at the station’s base camp for young visitors to discover and read. It’s all part of a concerted campaign of “information by stealth”, says Gaffikin.

For the 2008 exhibition Amazing Butterflies, aimed at younger children, the labels were written in verse: it worked like a charm, as children could anticipate the rhymes. For Ice Station Antarctica, Gaffikin tested out captions in the styles of Mizz and Toxic magazines, Dorling Kindersley books and Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider novels.

Toxic proved most popular with those aged five and six, while seven to eight-year-olds preferred Dorling Kindersley. The text panels adopted a layered approach: a short heading, a question for parents to ask their children, 50-100 words of meatier content and a snappy sign-off, positioned at child height.

A range of voices

As the success of Wikipedia proves, the wisdom of crowds is more accessible than expert opinion. Captions by non-specialists can add a fresh voice to interpretation.

In Tate Britain’s 2008 exhibition The Lure of the East, the curators’ labels were interspersed with contributions from contemporary observers on the subjects depicted.

At Kelvingrove, the current Souvenirs of War display includes a Qur’an brought back by a Scottish soldier from the second Afghan war, with a comment by a contemporary Afghan living in Glasgow.

A range of voices makes for textured language and extends the museum conversation. As long as it complements and doesn’t supplant expert opinion, it should escape accusations of dumbing down.

“You can’t possibly get it right,” says Lucy Trench. “Wherever you pitch it, there’ll always be people who say it’s too high or too low-brow.”

On the positive side, debate is healthy, and is a sign that people are reading the labels.

Laura Gascoigne is a freelance arts journalist.

- Iconic
- Iconography
- Chiaroscuro
- Eclectic
- Cretaceous, Jurassic or any other geological period (without explanation)
- Sub-periods of Korean, Chinese or Japanese pottery (ditto)
- Figure (rather than “man” or “woman”)
- Factor (rather than “thing”)
- Anything in Latin
- Anything starting with a subordinate clause

A Museums Association one-day conference on how to write effective gallery text takes place on 22 March in London. To find out more, click here