About 50 years ago, sociologist Theodor Adorno described a central dilemma of art museums: some reduced the visitor experience to the level of receiving information, while others intervened as little as possible, and assumed that the visitor’s direct experience of the artworks was paramount.
Thirty-five years later, Tate director Nicholas Serota characterised this problem as that of “experience or interpretation”.
He said: “Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than find themselves standing on the conveyor belt of history.”
The same difficulties are still dogging visual art displays. But rather than being restricted to the confines of academic debate, they’ve become public.
Only this summer London’s Saatchi Gallery hosted a discussion with the motion: “Museums are bad at telling us why art matters.” Speakers included Tate Modern director Chris Dercon, National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne and art critic Matthew Collings.
Leonardo homework
So why has the debate about “experience vs interpretation” resurfaced now? Earlier this year, a couple of art museum directors were unusually candid about their attitudes to the provision of interpretation.
London’s National Gallery is, as a way of dealing with visitor demand for its current Leonardo da Vinci show (until 5 February 2012), restricting admission numbers so as to give people more space to look at the paintings.
National Gallery director Nicholas Penny, quoted in the Guardian in May, suggested that visitors will get more out of it if they do their homework first: “They can download all the information that people stand and read beforehand. The whole experience can be properly prepared for.”
Looking at paintings is clearly considered to be better than reading labels. However, the gallery is still providing an audioguide for those who haven’t made sufficient effort.
Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis is looking to develop new displays that feature a route through the collection via a series of galleries, hung chronologically, with minimal labels and no wall texts.
Earlier this year she told the Spectator magazine that she wants to leave interpretation open-ended: “I want people to engage directly with the art, to get hooked, not to read what an interpretation team has cobbled together – if they like what they see, there are endless opportunities to find out more about it elsewhere.”
While it sounds like the writing’s on the wall for the interpretation team, Tate Britain’s new interpretation strategy claims to be flexible. It says the gallery is working towards a more “pluralistic approach to the provision of complementary information”.
The strategy describes how the chronological hang will prioritise visual experience and “the adjoining focus displays will be accompanied by more in-depth information, provided in a variety of ways”. Exhibitions will be taken on a case-by-case basis.
This allows for no interpretation on the one hand, or, if Room 5 of the John Martin exhibition (until 15 January 2012) is anything to go by, spectacular (and some might say over the top) forms of interpretation on the other.
Artists and audiences
Art museums often collaborate with living artists and function as a “home” for their work. This raises issues about artists’ expectations in relation to public galleries as well as questions about how the relationship between curators, artists and the public might be negotiated.
Developing a rapport with artists isn’t the same as developing one with the audiences. The Walker Art Gallery’s British Art, 1880-1950, gallery (see box below), attempts to square the circle by generating empathy for the artists among the visitors. Interpretation at the Liverpool gallery partly rests on descriptions of the lives of key artists, and the significance that particular works had for them.
Galleries often commission artists to respond to their spaces. Four of the six artists whose work featured in Turner Contemporary’s opening show exhibited their reactions to the gallery’s Margate setting.
But, according to one arts funder who prefers not to be named, when curators write about the artists that they’re working with, there’s a danger of them going completely overboard.
“Their use of language is a real problem. Catalogues are often hopelessly inadequate. The effect of attempting to make something appear more impressive and authoritative may be to diminish it.”
An additional problem is when curators do not provide a narrative, or even basic information for the public. The excuse is that “over-interpretation kills”, which is backed- up by the legitimacy attached to personal interpretation.
Vivienne Bennett, director of visual arts at Arts Council England, says: “Since anyone can have a view, there’s no need for experts. Whereas galleries previously led people, they’re now engaged with what people bring themselves.
“The fact is that people have got different learning styles, and they’re gathering information from all sorts other sources, like blogs and Twitter.”
One regional gallery manager that I spoke to had been forbidden to have anything more than information labels for a publicly funded, national touring show of contemporary art.
“One of the artists didn’t want any information about their work made available… the curators were adamant about it. It created distress around our production of ancillary materials. We weren’t allowed to have a feedback wall. The visitors were disgruntled. But it helped establish a closer dialogue between them and the visitor assistants.”
So, curators are determining galleries’ approaches to interpretation, rather than listening to what visitors might need and want. Arguably, there are few other areas of public life in which the protagonists are granted the right to exert such control, if not censorship.
Maurice Davies, the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association, says he has come to regard labels as “the microcosm of conflict within museums – not least, the social versus curatorial emphases”.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Glasgow Museums is committed to demystifying the art experience and encouraging its visitors to take a personal journey through layers of interpretation.
Victoria Hollows, museum manager of the city’s Gallery of Modern Art, says: “Texts should be within the reach of every visitor, ranging from the first-time visitor to the seasoned scholar.”
Text or no text?
Glasgow’s policy is to stick to 30-word labels for all its displays, which goes against the grain of fine-art culture. Mark O’Neill, the director of policy, research and development at Glasgow Museums, says that the only criticisms made about Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum’s 2006 refurbishment were by art critics, who accused the museum of dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
What gallery staff observe is that visitors struggle without labels. While some in the art world like to believe that labels stop people looking at art, Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at London’s Royal Academy (RA), has noticed that “the absence of labels can make audiences quite nervous. They tend to walk past more quickly.”
The public’s complaints about wall texts and labels only ever tend to be about legibility.
A central issue for art interpretation has to do with how much of it there is. Sarah Hyde, former head of interpretation at Tate Britain, says its odd that “science curators worry that visitors don’t get enough text, but art curators worry that they’re getting too much”.
However, the fact that many galleries emphasise the virtue of direct experience, doesn’t mean that interpretation isn’t available: it just isn’t necessarily available near the object, and it may not be text or wall-based.
A raft of publicly funded contemporary art galleries have opened over the past few years. Several are using knowledgeable gallery assistants to enhance the visitor experience. Margate’s Turner Contemporary, which opened in April, relies on its team of navigators to help people get more out of the gallery and the exhibition (see box below).
The Towner gallery, which reopened in Eastbourne two years ago, positions assistants in each space to improve the experience for visitors.
Most art galleries are providing increasing amounts of content online. Visitors can download free podcasts from the National Gallery, the RA and Tate. And Tate Channel, the organisation’s online media outlet, has more than 1,000 items available, including curators’ blogs and interviews with artists.
This complementary information isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s increasingly recognised as a commodity in its own right.
An extreme example is Tate’s recently announced plan to develop a four-year programme of artist performances created specifically to be broadcast live online. Over and above the usual types of paid-for information (such as audioguides and catalogues), galleries are exploiting a range of other knowledge-based services.
Tate offers private guided tours from £5 to £1,000. Prices vary according to the size of the group, but costs also relate to the status of the guide, the degree of exclusivity guaranteed, and so on.
While the opportunities are probably greatest at the London nationals, the market potential isn’t being ignored elsewhere. Turner Contemporary is offering a £2.50 option of 60-minute sessions tailored to a specific group and adaptable for any age.
Perhaps the solution to the “experience versus interpretation” dilemma lies in a compromise between the interpretation provided and the nature of the experience available.
Alexander Sturgis, the director of the Holburne Museum in Bath, recalls a moment on a museum course in the days when the accepted wisdom was to explain everything.
“We were asked to recall an event that was significant in our own museum-visiting experiences,” Sturgis says. “We all described the moment when we started thinking about something that no one else had spotted.”
Sara Selwood is an independent writer, researcher and consultant
British Art 1880-1950 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
British Art 1880 -1950 is the most recently refurbished permanent collection gallery at the Walker. It makes the fine and decorative art collections more engaging to a wider range of audiences and explains a complicated story about how Victorian art changed into modern art in an accessible and interesting way.
Audience research had shown that visitors found a chronological display of art in this time period confusing, so the project team developed four clear themes that root the artworks firmly in their historical context. Visitors also wanted more information about the lives of artists, while schools need information relating to the curriculum.
Labels provide this multi-layered information and an interactive audiovisual timeline links historical events, artists and art movements. An interpretive approach, familiar in museums, encourages exploring through doing, touch and sound to enable alternative ways for a wide range of audiences to engage with the works on display.
Throughout the project, the challenge was to provide plenty of information and engagement while retaining a strong and coherent visual experience. The resulting displays are designed to display the artworks to best effect with new lighting and surroundings so that people experience familiar works as if for the first time.
Visitors of all ages are delighted, including a primary school visitor who was inspired to write: “I like the new room with the feely bits; it made me want to do art.”
Reyahn King is the director of art galleries at National Museums Liverpool
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Inspired by JMW Turner’s sense of enquiry, Turner Contemporary offers a space for everyone to embrace their curiosity and to discover different ways of seeing, thinking and learning. A strong sense of place, and our role as a catalyst for the wider regeneration of the area, continuously informs our programme.
We have led projects with schools and the community since 2001, enabling 690,000 people to see our work, or become involved in our development before the gallery opened in April 2011.
At the point when we needed to recruit front-of-house staff we secured funding to train 30 people who were on unemployment benefits. We have recruited 14 of them to work as gallery assistants. They gained accreditation in areas including customer service, health and safety and retail, and also worked with artists.
The gallery assistants have been trained alongside everyone else in the organisation and they have worked with a body-language specialist and a practical philosopher to learn to engage visitors in discussions about artists’ work and ideas.
Another of our strengths is the extensive intergenerational work that we have developed. Inspired by Margate’s history as a centre for youth culture, Time of Our Lives, brought together people aged 60 and above with 13 to 25 year olds, to consider what it means to be a teenager, both now and in the past.
This project was a key influence in the development of our current exhibition, Nothing in the World But Youth (until 8 January 2012), which features more than 200 works by 94 artists, including Henry Moore, Peter Blake, Sarah Lucas, Andy Warhol and David Hockney alongside work made by teenagers today.
As this exhibition took shape, we were aware that all visitors would have a personal connection to the subject matter, and our main vehicle for interpretation became the way works were hung. Margate is the home of Turner Contemporary and our ideas are borne from a strong sense of place and a growing knowledge of our audiences.
This does not mean that we run a provincial organisation. On the contrary, our ambition is bringing national and international attention to the town, and is further proof of the artistic validity of organisations working outside of the metropolis.
Karen Eslea is the head of learning at Turner Contemporary, Margate
Thirty-five years later, Tate director Nicholas Serota characterised this problem as that of “experience or interpretation”.
He said: “Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than find themselves standing on the conveyor belt of history.”
The same difficulties are still dogging visual art displays. But rather than being restricted to the confines of academic debate, they’ve become public.
Only this summer London’s Saatchi Gallery hosted a discussion with the motion: “Museums are bad at telling us why art matters.” Speakers included Tate Modern director Chris Dercon, National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne and art critic Matthew Collings.
Leonardo homework
So why has the debate about “experience vs interpretation” resurfaced now? Earlier this year, a couple of art museum directors were unusually candid about their attitudes to the provision of interpretation.
London’s National Gallery is, as a way of dealing with visitor demand for its current Leonardo da Vinci show (until 5 February 2012), restricting admission numbers so as to give people more space to look at the paintings.
National Gallery director Nicholas Penny, quoted in the Guardian in May, suggested that visitors will get more out of it if they do their homework first: “They can download all the information that people stand and read beforehand. The whole experience can be properly prepared for.”
Looking at paintings is clearly considered to be better than reading labels. However, the gallery is still providing an audioguide for those who haven’t made sufficient effort.
Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis is looking to develop new displays that feature a route through the collection via a series of galleries, hung chronologically, with minimal labels and no wall texts.
Earlier this year she told the Spectator magazine that she wants to leave interpretation open-ended: “I want people to engage directly with the art, to get hooked, not to read what an interpretation team has cobbled together – if they like what they see, there are endless opportunities to find out more about it elsewhere.”
While it sounds like the writing’s on the wall for the interpretation team, Tate Britain’s new interpretation strategy claims to be flexible. It says the gallery is working towards a more “pluralistic approach to the provision of complementary information”.
The strategy describes how the chronological hang will prioritise visual experience and “the adjoining focus displays will be accompanied by more in-depth information, provided in a variety of ways”. Exhibitions will be taken on a case-by-case basis.
This allows for no interpretation on the one hand, or, if Room 5 of the John Martin exhibition (until 15 January 2012) is anything to go by, spectacular (and some might say over the top) forms of interpretation on the other.
Artists and audiences
Art museums often collaborate with living artists and function as a “home” for their work. This raises issues about artists’ expectations in relation to public galleries as well as questions about how the relationship between curators, artists and the public might be negotiated.
Developing a rapport with artists isn’t the same as developing one with the audiences. The Walker Art Gallery’s British Art, 1880-1950, gallery (see box below), attempts to square the circle by generating empathy for the artists among the visitors. Interpretation at the Liverpool gallery partly rests on descriptions of the lives of key artists, and the significance that particular works had for them.
Galleries often commission artists to respond to their spaces. Four of the six artists whose work featured in Turner Contemporary’s opening show exhibited their reactions to the gallery’s Margate setting.
But, according to one arts funder who prefers not to be named, when curators write about the artists that they’re working with, there’s a danger of them going completely overboard.
“Their use of language is a real problem. Catalogues are often hopelessly inadequate. The effect of attempting to make something appear more impressive and authoritative may be to diminish it.”
An additional problem is when curators do not provide a narrative, or even basic information for the public. The excuse is that “over-interpretation kills”, which is backed- up by the legitimacy attached to personal interpretation.
Vivienne Bennett, director of visual arts at Arts Council England, says: “Since anyone can have a view, there’s no need for experts. Whereas galleries previously led people, they’re now engaged with what people bring themselves.
“The fact is that people have got different learning styles, and they’re gathering information from all sorts other sources, like blogs and Twitter.”
One regional gallery manager that I spoke to had been forbidden to have anything more than information labels for a publicly funded, national touring show of contemporary art.
“One of the artists didn’t want any information about their work made available… the curators were adamant about it. It created distress around our production of ancillary materials. We weren’t allowed to have a feedback wall. The visitors were disgruntled. But it helped establish a closer dialogue between them and the visitor assistants.”
So, curators are determining galleries’ approaches to interpretation, rather than listening to what visitors might need and want. Arguably, there are few other areas of public life in which the protagonists are granted the right to exert such control, if not censorship.
Maurice Davies, the head of policy and communication at the Museums Association, says he has come to regard labels as “the microcosm of conflict within museums – not least, the social versus curatorial emphases”.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Glasgow Museums is committed to demystifying the art experience and encouraging its visitors to take a personal journey through layers of interpretation.
Victoria Hollows, museum manager of the city’s Gallery of Modern Art, says: “Texts should be within the reach of every visitor, ranging from the first-time visitor to the seasoned scholar.”
Text or no text?
Glasgow’s policy is to stick to 30-word labels for all its displays, which goes against the grain of fine-art culture. Mark O’Neill, the director of policy, research and development at Glasgow Museums, says that the only criticisms made about Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum’s 2006 refurbishment were by art critics, who accused the museum of dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
What gallery staff observe is that visitors struggle without labels. While some in the art world like to believe that labels stop people looking at art, Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at London’s Royal Academy (RA), has noticed that “the absence of labels can make audiences quite nervous. They tend to walk past more quickly.”
The public’s complaints about wall texts and labels only ever tend to be about legibility.
A central issue for art interpretation has to do with how much of it there is. Sarah Hyde, former head of interpretation at Tate Britain, says its odd that “science curators worry that visitors don’t get enough text, but art curators worry that they’re getting too much”.
However, the fact that many galleries emphasise the virtue of direct experience, doesn’t mean that interpretation isn’t available: it just isn’t necessarily available near the object, and it may not be text or wall-based.
A raft of publicly funded contemporary art galleries have opened over the past few years. Several are using knowledgeable gallery assistants to enhance the visitor experience. Margate’s Turner Contemporary, which opened in April, relies on its team of navigators to help people get more out of the gallery and the exhibition (see box below).
The Towner gallery, which reopened in Eastbourne two years ago, positions assistants in each space to improve the experience for visitors.
Most art galleries are providing increasing amounts of content online. Visitors can download free podcasts from the National Gallery, the RA and Tate. And Tate Channel, the organisation’s online media outlet, has more than 1,000 items available, including curators’ blogs and interviews with artists.
This complementary information isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s increasingly recognised as a commodity in its own right.
An extreme example is Tate’s recently announced plan to develop a four-year programme of artist performances created specifically to be broadcast live online. Over and above the usual types of paid-for information (such as audioguides and catalogues), galleries are exploiting a range of other knowledge-based services.
Tate offers private guided tours from £5 to £1,000. Prices vary according to the size of the group, but costs also relate to the status of the guide, the degree of exclusivity guaranteed, and so on.
While the opportunities are probably greatest at the London nationals, the market potential isn’t being ignored elsewhere. Turner Contemporary is offering a £2.50 option of 60-minute sessions tailored to a specific group and adaptable for any age.
Perhaps the solution to the “experience versus interpretation” dilemma lies in a compromise between the interpretation provided and the nature of the experience available.
Alexander Sturgis, the director of the Holburne Museum in Bath, recalls a moment on a museum course in the days when the accepted wisdom was to explain everything.
“We were asked to recall an event that was significant in our own museum-visiting experiences,” Sturgis says. “We all described the moment when we started thinking about something that no one else had spotted.”
Sara Selwood is an independent writer, researcher and consultant
Case study
British Art 1880-1950 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
British Art 1880 -1950 is the most recently refurbished permanent collection gallery at the Walker. It makes the fine and decorative art collections more engaging to a wider range of audiences and explains a complicated story about how Victorian art changed into modern art in an accessible and interesting way.
Audience research had shown that visitors found a chronological display of art in this time period confusing, so the project team developed four clear themes that root the artworks firmly in their historical context. Visitors also wanted more information about the lives of artists, while schools need information relating to the curriculum.
Labels provide this multi-layered information and an interactive audiovisual timeline links historical events, artists and art movements. An interpretive approach, familiar in museums, encourages exploring through doing, touch and sound to enable alternative ways for a wide range of audiences to engage with the works on display.
Throughout the project, the challenge was to provide plenty of information and engagement while retaining a strong and coherent visual experience. The resulting displays are designed to display the artworks to best effect with new lighting and surroundings so that people experience familiar works as if for the first time.
Visitors of all ages are delighted, including a primary school visitor who was inspired to write: “I like the new room with the feely bits; it made me want to do art.”
Reyahn King is the director of art galleries at National Museums Liverpool
Case study
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Inspired by JMW Turner’s sense of enquiry, Turner Contemporary offers a space for everyone to embrace their curiosity and to discover different ways of seeing, thinking and learning. A strong sense of place, and our role as a catalyst for the wider regeneration of the area, continuously informs our programme.
We have led projects with schools and the community since 2001, enabling 690,000 people to see our work, or become involved in our development before the gallery opened in April 2011.
At the point when we needed to recruit front-of-house staff we secured funding to train 30 people who were on unemployment benefits. We have recruited 14 of them to work as gallery assistants. They gained accreditation in areas including customer service, health and safety and retail, and also worked with artists.
The gallery assistants have been trained alongside everyone else in the organisation and they have worked with a body-language specialist and a practical philosopher to learn to engage visitors in discussions about artists’ work and ideas.
Another of our strengths is the extensive intergenerational work that we have developed. Inspired by Margate’s history as a centre for youth culture, Time of Our Lives, brought together people aged 60 and above with 13 to 25 year olds, to consider what it means to be a teenager, both now and in the past.
This project was a key influence in the development of our current exhibition, Nothing in the World But Youth (until 8 January 2012), which features more than 200 works by 94 artists, including Henry Moore, Peter Blake, Sarah Lucas, Andy Warhol and David Hockney alongside work made by teenagers today.
As this exhibition took shape, we were aware that all visitors would have a personal connection to the subject matter, and our main vehicle for interpretation became the way works were hung. Margate is the home of Turner Contemporary and our ideas are borne from a strong sense of place and a growing knowledge of our audiences.
This does not mean that we run a provincial organisation. On the contrary, our ambition is bringing national and international attention to the town, and is further proof of the artistic validity of organisations working outside of the metropolis.
Karen Eslea is the head of learning at Turner Contemporary, Margate
