Why Are Museum Wall Texts So Bad?

0:00Now on view at the Jewish Museum, Modernity and Opulence, Women of the Wiener Werkstata, explores the innovation and influence of the women artists, designers, and tastemakers who shaped modernist aesthetics in 20th century Vienna. Located at 5th Avenue and 92nd Street, NYC, through November 15th. Tickets at thejewishmuseum.org. So it gets to those sins, but it's more positive and affirmative and proactive. Do this as opposed to don't do that. It tells you what to do. Too long, too abstract. And too much jargon are some things that are often barriers to visitor understanding.

0:45I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:00The humble wall label at an art exhibition has a funny status. It feels, on the one hand, like a side note or an afterthought. On the other, it is a first point of contact and literal guide for a visitor looking to know more. There is an entire undersung discipline, visitor studies, which has put a lot of time into thinking about how museums communicate. And yet, even so, some of the most prestigious exhibitions in the world are crawling with texts that I can barely understand. As a matter of fact, I've griped so much about bad text at art biennials and shows that I try not to do it anymore, just to avoid repeating myself.

1:39But recently, I decided I would get it out of my system for good and be constructive and write an essay about where I think these texts go wrong and what I think works. In writing that essay, I reached out to Catherine Whitney. Whitney thinks about museum texts professionally. She has worked with a number of museums and with Beverly Sorrell on the 2024 edition of Sorrell's Exhibit Labels and Interpretive Approach, a standard resource on this subject. This is a nerdy topic, maybe, but it's also an essential topic. One that helps clear your mind about what you want from a museum in the first place.

2:19But mostly, unlike a lot of problems facing art right now, the problem of bad text is one that can be fixed. Well, Catherine Whitney, thank you for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I imagine some people are curious about you before we get started. What's your background? How do you get into writing museum wall texts or museum labels? Well, it's kind of been a long and zigzaggy route, but I have an undergraduate degree in art history. And many years later, I got a master's degree in museum studies. And I started working as a museum exhibition developer, which is a job I didn't even know existed.

3:02But it means that I get to work with a team of people on an exhibition with designers and content experts. An exhibition developer is the person who represents the audience and who thinks about the audience and the visitor and who is translating the content for the visitor. And that sort of inevitably led me to not only helping develop content in an exhibition, but also writing the exhibit labels. And that, because I'm a writer and I love writing, that ended up being my favorite part of the process. And how testy is that? Is there a lot of debate behind the scenes about these kind of texts? Well, depending on the project, we do work them over.

3:46There's a lot of review. The content expert will read the text. In a museum setting, a lot of different people have to read over the text. Educators, publicists, front-facing offices like publications will read the text. It is looked at by a lot of different people. And sometimes you have state agencies who want to make sure that the right information is in there and the wrong information is not. So it does get seen by a lot of people, if that's what you mean. Yeah, well, I realize that I go to museums and read a lot of text about artwork, so I have a lot of opinions about the texts. I don't know if to some people this seems like a boring or technical question, but I think the texts are really important.

4:31They're like a point of first contact. What would be your case for the importance of this kind of conversation that we're having right now? I think they are important. I think exhibit labels are one medium among many that help visitors understand what the institution is trying to say, and it helps them feel welcome. And I think we owe it to our visitors to make this information accessible and to make them not have to work too hard. I think the labels are not an end in themselves, but they are in service of something larger, which is to help visitors understand what they're seeing and to make sense of their experience in a museum.

5:08Yeah, I find the question so interesting because, I mean, I guess we'll get into it, but it kind of immediately brings up the question of, you know, what is important? What do you need to know in order to like or be interested in a particular work of art? There's a woman named Judy Rand who many years ago wrote something called the Visitor's Bill of Rights. So that addresses issues even before visitors get to reading the labels, issues of comfort, orientation, welcoming and belonging, enjoyment, socializing, respect. Actually, she was inspired by Disneyland. That's an institution that really values their visitors and their comfort.

5:42So we take that very seriously in museums, that visitors are here and they deserve to be comfortable and they deserve to understand why they're there and have an experience that's enjoyable. And yeah, so not frustrated. I went into this to writing an article about wall texts based on some frustrations I'd had and kind of came out swinging. And when I reached out to you about how I think there's a crisis of wall labels, as I get into it, I start to think about, you know, there is this large industry of people, the entire discipline of visitor research that are thinking very deeply about these things.

6:22So it makes me consider, you know, whether I'm just dwelling on the worst examples in front of me. But you agreed with me that you said that you did think that there is at least some kind of systematic problem with a lot of wall labeling. So how do you see that manifest? Well, I was thinking about your example in particular about the biennials. And I think biennials are a class apart from museums in some ways. They're an art fair that's exposing people to the latest current contemporary art. So there's that. And I think that they are not as visitor focused. They're different than a museum, which has an institution as dedicated to their visitors.

7:01I did want to also call out a number of museums that are really making an effort. We, in the third edition of Exhibit Labels and Interpretive Approach that I co-wrote this edition with Beverly Sorrell, we called out a number of museums, institutions that are really making an effort to write visitor-friendly text and also just be visitor-centered museums. And they include the Detroit Institute of Art, which reopened their whole collection in 2007, guided by the question, how can visitor studies, really talking to visitors, help the institution be more visitor-centered? The Minneapolis Institute of Art also had a robust evaluation program.

7:41The Exploratorium is kind of the apex in terms of doing visitor research and writing and rewriting labels so that visitors really understand them and can interact with science exhibits in a way that helps them understand the phenomenon. Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas is really committed to making the museum accessible for all visitors. And they even explicitly call out neurodiverse visitors. and then I'll just make a plug for the Association of Art Museum Interpreters. This is a group of educators specifically in art museums that are really dedicated to art education and visitor accessibility.

8:18So there is a whole movement, like you said, that you didn't even know about that's going on. There are a lot of museums and I'm sure there are even more museums that are really trying to make an effort. The Nelson Atkins Museum is one, but I haven't been to all the museums. You know, I'm just one person. No, I think it's a really important issue in the sense that the texts are the first point of contact. And there's a lot of angst about the visitorship to museums now and thinking about what a contemporary audience needs to think about art. I do think the problem is worse than some of these art events that are actually maybe more focused at the international art world on the highest professional level.

8:59It's almost interesting to me that it's at the more elite level that the problem gets worse, or at least worse for me. Maybe that's telling. But maybe I just want to get some of that data that's behind the scenes out there in the open where the average person writing about text can think about it. Even artists think about how to interpret their own work. In the book, Beverly Sorrell, your co-author, has these eight sins of exhibit labels or something like that. And the first two are too long and too jargony. Well, I will just say that we decided in the third edition to get away from the list of don'ts and no's and sins.

9:36Really? Why? Why? Just to be more positive, which actually goes back to like brain science. If you want to change a habit, it's a lot easier to be positive about what you're doing as opposed to saying, don't do this. So now we have 16 guidelines. officially it's 16 guidelines for making better interpretive labels which include relating to having a big idea and knowing your audience having a recognizable system of labels which you've mentioned before being short as possible and only including the necessary information so it gets to those sins but it's more positive and affirmative and proactive do this as opposed to don't do that.

10:18It tells you what to do. Too long, too abstract, and too much jargon are some things that are often barriers to visitor understanding. So we've used the term interpretive and the term big idea. Maybe just quickly define those terms. Sure. So an interpretive label is a label that serves to explain or guide, question, inform, or provoke the visitor in a way that really invites participation by the reader. And the big idea? And the big idea is a statement about what an exhibition is about. And it provides an unambiguous focus for the exhibit team as they're developing the exhibition. It really helps to guide what content is included and then what content is left out.

11:04And it's primarily for the team. So it can involve language that's not necessarily visitor friendly. And sometimes it ends up being out there in the exhibition and sometimes not. It's kind of a guiding framework. Yeah. And because so much of the problem with some of the labels I think of is that they're too long and they're kind of trying to tell you everything about the artist or the artwork. It's really your guide for what to leave out, right? Exactly. It really helps the editing process because there's always the compulsion to put more and more and more. It's like experts, people who love the artwork writing, you know, it's like they've got too much to say.

11:42I mean, just to give an example that was on my mind, The New Museum has this very good show, I thought, called New Humans that it opened with. And I was looking through my photos of the labels for that show. And I'll just give you an example of just the first part of a label for an artist named Jana Euler. The German artist Jana Euler's work bounds between a variety of stylistic conceits, trafficking in grotesque, monstrous, contorted, eroticized, and frequently off-putting representations of figures, both human and not. Aping the jokey anarchist attitude, surrealist fixations, and twinned skepticism and faith in the field of painting characterized by German artists of the post-war period, Euler marries their radical gestures with savage satires of the human condition typically expressed in brutally naturalistic depictions associated with the Neue Zachlichkeit New Objectivity Movement of the 1920s.

12:37The body is ubiquitous in Euler's work frequently displayed in positions of cartoonish abject carnality and discomforting vulnerability. And it goes on from there. But that's just before you get to the actual description of the specific work. I mean, not to ambush you, but what do you think of something like that as just an introduction to a work of art? It's a lot. It's a lot to wade through. What I would might do with that text is bring it down onto the floor of the museum and have someone read it out loud. This is something we do with exhibit texts. And if a visitor looks at what they have in front of them and says all of it, then you know it's too long.

13:12And then when they stumble over words, like foreign words or multi-syllabic words that aren't familiar to them, we know those words should come out. And then we would ask them, well, what do you think this means? Or what do you get out of this? And if they can't tell us what we want to be communicating to them, then we know we need to rewrite it. I think that particular example, it's not necessarily bad writing, but it's not appropriate for a museum setting, right? In some ways, too good a writing, right? I think that's where it becomes a little bit tricky, right? It's full of kind of nice flourishes and these tripartite clause structures that like have a certain kind of rhythm for a certain kind of audience with a certain kind of axis art history.

13:53It contextualizes the work. But in some ways, I mean, I guess I feel like that maybe is not what the label should be doing. It's literary writing, right? That's what you just described. But it's not appropriate for an exhibit label. So would you literally lay out the text and And you would start striking words. You'd start paring it down. If I was to rewrite that label, I would try to understand first what they were trying to say and then try to say it more directly. We do something called core editing where we take out words that are hard to understand or hard to read. And then if it's a word that the content expert is really married to, if we can strike out the word and still understand the sentence, then sometimes we can keep it in as long as it's not something people stumble over.

14:36What we noticed in visitor studies, visitor timing and tracking studies, when we watch people in museums, is that when they come to too many difficult words, they'll just stop reading and move on. So we want to make sure that it's not a burden. The label is not a burden. Well, there's a saying in journalism, give me twice the time and I'll give you half the length. And I think some of this actually comes down to lack of time. I mean, it's something that I know you and your co-author have talked about. It actually is kind of formidable, the amount of time that you recommend to put into individual labels.

15:14Exactly. It's a lot of time. And then the visitor research on top of that is a lot of time and money. To talk to visitors in a systematic way, it takes budget and time. Yeah. I mean, it's worth the effort, but it does take time. Am I wrong that it's like three hours times three per label? Something like that? Something like that. Yeah. When I budget labels, it's roughly four hours a label from start to finish. And that's when I have the content. I'm not doing the research. The guidelines are to actually workshop it with the public to see what they actually think about it. So speaking of the public, I feel like some of these questions are actually questions about, as we already alluded to, what the audience even is.

15:57I mean, do you agree with that? I think some of the worst examples I can think of have to do with a little bit of ambiguity about who the text is talking to. Yeah, we talk about visitors in ways that are both general and specific. There are certain things that visitors to museums have in common. There's a need for physical comfort and non-threatening spaces. We have to acknowledge that some people might come in hungry or tired. There's a yearning for continuity when people are experiencing a museum exhibition. There's a love of a good story that we all humans share. Our brain has the ability to seek and find patterns.

16:35We have a kind of innate natural spirituality. So those things are kind of visitors' basic needs that we talk about. And then when we're developing an exhibition, we want to know about our audience, the people who are coming to our institutions, and we can workshop ideas. So this is not an art example, but for example, the Oakland Museum of California wanted to do an exhibition about water and watersheds. And watersheds are kind of tricky. They kind of knew that people— I'm not even sure I totally know the technical definition of a watershed. The technical definition of a watershed is where all water in a system drains to the same place.

17:15So they started asking visitors to the museum where their water came from. And most visitors said the faucet. So then they realized we have to really back it up a little bit and talk about, we have to tell people where the water comes from, that there's a whole system behind the faucet. And that was just an assumption they were making. They were starting at the watershed when they really had to start with the faucet, right, for example. For people who are thinking this, is this just a matter of dumbing things down? I don't think so. I find that the ultimate insult to visitors because visitors aren't dumb.

17:50and I think if labels are visitor-centered and informed by visitors, and if they're written and tested with visitors, that they'll be interesting and relevant and not dumb. That, I think, is a misconception. There's this term I've heard used, the commonest common denominator. What is that? That refers to that notion that there are these certain things that visitors have in common. It's almost like a Maslow's hierarchy. You know, we all have certain needs and we need those kind of physical needs to be met before we can be comfortable learning something new in a museum. So that's what that would mean in the context of our research and the book.

18:31Okay. So, so like there are certain specific kinds of information that just generally across sort of levels of familiarity with art are going to need. So you should aim for that. Right. They need orientation. They need to know where the bathrooms are. They need to know where they can get a snack. They need someplace they can sit down. So those are kind of basic things. They need to know that they're welcome, that we're thinking of them. Places to sit down in art museums are so appreciated. And then on the level of just an individual label interpreting an artwork, what is the commonest common need?

19:08Well, every exhibition has a system of labels, right? There are different types of labels in an exhibition. There's a title that tells you what you're looking at. There are introductory labels that introduce a big idea that orient a visitor, that sort of delineate themes. Section labels announce a new area of an exhibition. Concept labels might give you information about a new idea. Group labels might tell you what are common things about a specific group of objects. Captions talk to you specifically about an individual object. And it helps to have that system be kind of recognizable so that visitors know, oh, this is where I'm going to learn about what this exhibition is about.

19:51This is the first text I'm coming to. And oh, this is a caption. I can learn something more about this particular work of art, for example. So each label usually has its own rules, and an institution will have a style guide that will tell what the label consists of, how many words, what the purpose of the label is. And that groundwork helps the visitor, ultimately, because there's a consistency to style. I think that manifests kind of unconsciously. And as I reflect on my own experiences and frustrations, I realize that in some of the exhibitions where I have been most frustrated, there is a kind of ambiguity in terms of the rules behind the text that I'm sort of like starting again with each label in terms of trying to decode where the information that I need is.

20:43I was just going to say, you know, there are some things that every label should be in support of a big idea and should use chunks or short text and paragraphs as opposed to big blocks of text. They should be as short and concise as possible. Literally, the typography should be easy to read. I've seen many exhibitions where there's white type on a gray background and it's really small and you have to bend over. And then hopefully every label should be the result of prototyping. It should have been tested.

21:19Catherine, let me throw a specific gripe I have at you. And then you tell me if this is like an art critic specific gripe or if it's something that folks in the field think about. So I find that, and I think perhaps this is why biennials are rougher to me in terms of the text, is that I find that there's a lot of ambiguity about what is being described or what is being introduced. Is it the artist or the artwork? And I find that the text in the labels that I find most vexing often is moving back and forth between doing those two things. in a very, I just got back from Gwangju, Korea, where I was at the Gwangju Biennial, and was thinking about this conversation, noting every single artwork almost begins with at least one sentence of text introducing the artist before we get to the artwork.

22:13It's not actually always consistent, though. Sometimes it'll work in a different way, and so I'm kind of constantly scanning the label looking for something else. But what do you think? I mean, this is perhaps down to a certain kind of ambiguity around contemporary art and how important personal background is. But what do you think the structure of the label in terms of presenting the artwork should be? As you were talking, it came to mind that at a biennial, you may have multiple authors of texts, like each pavilion would have its own writer. Often do, yeah. So there's probably not a consistent style guide for what those labels would look like, for one thing.

22:52So I think a style guide is really helpful so that all the labels have a similar format. I think one of the rules that we highlight in our book is to have the label refer to what you're looking at to be specific. So that's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. Contextual. Yeah. So the information about the artist is not necessarily the most important information for a visitor in a museum context, But then also it kind of goes back to the big idea of the exhibition. So if you have an overarching idea that's guiding all your labels, all your content, it may be that you want people to know more about the artist.

23:34Where the artist fits into the concept of the show. You know, for the show about the environment, this artist is an environmentalist or this artist works with biological material. I'm going to just give you another long label as an example from the Guangzhou Biennial, just to give you, I mean, folks listening, a sense of what I'm talking about. You're walking up one of the stairways. There's an audio work of art there. And the first part of the label, this is just the very first part, reads,

24:22And actually, I'll stop there. It goes on several more sentences talking about actually just electronic music in general before it explains to you this thing you can't even see what you're looking at. I mean, what do you think of that? I think it would be hard to go through a whole fair or biennial and read every label if it was like that. I guess that's what I would say. Yeah. I would get tired. Well, it's something you told me in a previous conversation. I think you said an exhibit label is not a book on the wall. Right. Exactly. Some people are so invested in the content, they want the visitor to know everything that they know about a subject, which you can totally empathize with.

25:04But a label is not necessarily the place to put all that information. So we might have other media. There may be a video where people sit down and watch a video about, you know, an introductory video about an artist or a background video, right? There's an exhibit catalog where some of those more meaty ideas might be. But we have to think about what's the most appropriate information to put in a label, keeping in mind that the visitor is on their feet. And you also want them to be looking at whatever it is that you're showing. The label is a means to an end in some respects. It's a way of helping them with the experience of being in the museum.

25:44Yeah, you said to me that the ideal user interaction with a text museum is read, look, read, look, not read, look. Right, that's right. going back and forth. And when we do timing and tracking studies, we're watching visitors in museums, watching them interact with the component of an exhibit. Can you describe in a little more detail what that tracking and testing of museum texts that you've participated in is like? Absolutely. As you referred to, there's a whole world out there that the public doesn't necessarily know about, but there is a whole field dedicated to visitor research in museums.

26:26There's a Visitor Studies Association, which is a national organization, and Beverly Sorrell wrote a book called Paying Attention and Visitors in Museum Exhibitions that is a study of 110 tracking and timing studies in museums. Tracking and timing is where we either knowingly or unobtrusively watch visitor behavior in museums. And we stand there with a clipboard and there's a floor plan of the museum and we track where the visitor goes, where they stop, how long they stop there, what behavior they're doing during that stop. Are they looking at the exhibit? Are they reading? Are they gesturing?