I’ve studied Museology (Museum Studies) and have been a Curator of museum exhibitions, and from these experiences I have come to understand that museums, like most businesses & startups, have to please seemingly conflicting needs. An example can be a Director fulfilling various requests of donors—the people who provided the big bucks that keep a museum alive. Then, you have families and tourists who want something that sparks their imagination and appreciation for things like art, history, or science. If you can’t, they will go to the Indiana Jones ride at Disney Land because the fake artifacts and presentation there are more engaging. Then, there is the obligation to be the bearers of accurate and full information, and thus you get the PhDs and Curators obsessed with precise information.

For a refreshing change, visit a smaller museum in your neighborhood. You are more likely to get one-on-one time with the Director or other key educators. A conversation with them will do more for your imagination and inspiration than any big exhibition label would.

I feel in love with museums as an undergraduate art history major, but never wanted to be a curator for some reason. I wanted to work in “audience development.” I wanted other people to experience the thrill of walking up to a famous painting and seeing it in the flesh for the first time. And the exhilaration of discovering an artists you didn’t know that you’d connect with.

But it was not to be. I interned in several institutions and was quickly disabused of the idea that museum leadership would ever be about appealing to the masses. Museum leadership is about appealing to wealthy people to share their collections and their money. Museums often lose their connection to life as it’s lived by 99% of the world today, much less the world that actually produced the work of art!

It’s hard for art museums to cross over this boundary. Often because the teams that put together the exhibits aren’t nearly as multidisciplinary as a science or history museum team. It’s no accident that when I was studying exhibition design and planning at Georgetown, that there aren’t very many examples from art museums on putting together and working with a broad team — a team with a project manager, education staff, writing group, curators (often several from different disciplines) and of course exhibit designers. All the team is working to formulate a “big idea” and then figure out how all the pieces will tell this story — the artifacts, the writing, the education programs and the design.

Art museums do still have that smaller view and an expectation of an audience that is not nearly as broad as history and science. Perhaps that’s the problem too, microview for a micro-audience. Only the very big shows that are “easily digestible” — your Monet shows, typically — are ever expected to draw big crowds. And there too often isn’t an understanding that art museums need to fill in gaps in education — that most people have only the faintest idea of art history. Art museums in particular need to do a better job of not just showing work uncommented upon — but explaining why, say, Kadinsky or Klee is so important. Why some work is so-called difficult to first appreciate and how that fits into a larger narrative about art history. The paintings alone don’t do this. There’s not the shared knowledge of art in the same way has historical narrative is shared.