Museum Critiques

Each student must write two museum critiques for this class. For the first critique, you can choose to write about either the Cleveland Museum of Art or The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. For your other critique, you should write about either the Great Lakes Science Center or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Critiques should be approximately 1200-1500 words (4-5 pages).

Margaret Lindauer's "The Critical Museum Visitor" offers a guide to how to ask questions of a museum and how to construct a critique. As modeled in Lindauer, your critique should focus on a specific exhibit or gallery in the context of the museum overall. You will need to make careful observations during your visit, but ultimately, your critique should have a clear thesis that uses those observations as evidence to support your argument. Critiques should draw on assigned readings as appropriate to help you better understand and contextualize the kind of museum you are critiquing.

Per Lindauer, here is a list of questions you will you want to think about as you visit different museums. Please note, I do not expect your critiques to address of these questions. They are listed to signal the kind of analysis and observations I want your critiques to be based upon. You can find the grading rubric here.

I. Before Entering/Entering

• Prior to entry: what does the museum say about who belongs inside? What messages does it giving the visitor who stands on the sidewalk outside thinking about coming in?

• Entry: What kind of space are you entering? How is the visitor made to feel? Will all visitors feel equally welcome? Will all visitors be able to use the museum in the same way? Is the expectation that the visitor will know what to do in this space? Is there an admission fee? How much? To what extent is your next step inside the museum obvious? What is the presence of security? What seems to be going on in the entryway?

II. The Museum Experience

• Passages through the museum: What is the overall narrative structure to the museum? Is this structure evident to you? What is the basic form of organization of the museum’s collections (how is its permanent collection organized)? Will the casual visitor notice it? Is your path through the museum relatively predetermined or do you make your own way? In larger museums, are there any messages given (or received) about which galleries are more important, which less?

• Basic museum design: Give some thought to basic design decisions about the museum’s interior architecture and how collections work with that architecture. Consider lighting, spaces for seating, conversation, etc., inside galleries.

• Museum collections: What percentage of the museum space is destined to the museum’s permanent collection? Are the visiting/changing exhibits located in a way to encourage a visit to the entire museum or just to that exhibit? Does the casual visitor have any idea that what is being shown is only a portion of the total collection? Would that change one’s perspective on the museum visit? If so, how?

• The overall museum space: What is the museum space used for besides the display of its collection? Shops? Food? Entertainment? Public spaces? Where are shops located? Where are restaurants or cafes/cafeterias located? Are the food areas set up to encourage school or group visits? What do the portions of the museum that are NOT designed for the display of collections tell you about who the museum expects as visitors? What provisions are made for different types of groups (school groups, elderly, disabled)? Can you easily find your way to these spaces? Will the visitors feel comfortable asking for information?

• Museum aids and technology: What kind of aids does the museum provide to help you understand its collection: narratives on the entry to the museum or galleries? Listening guides (audio sticks, digital recorders, podcasts, etc.)? Technology (iPads, interactive)? Docents? Guide books (free/pay/how much)? Other devices (e.g. heavy plastic sheets of information, maps, large-type handouts, etc.). If you use one of the guides (oral, visual, or written), what do you learn about who put the guide together? How is the authority of the museum transferred via the guide to the visitor? Observe the people who are using various devices designed to increase their understanding or interactions with the collection. Are there any forms of aid that seem to be particularly useful? To what extent is technology used to help the visitor experience and to what extent does it seem to get in the way?

III. The Gallery or Specific Exhibition

• The gallery and exhibition morphology: What is the narrative structure of any particular gallery/exhibition that you are focusing on (as opposed to the overall museum)? Is there an obvious way to move through the gallery? If so, what is its basic organizing principle? Can you approach the gallery from a different perspective, i.e., take a different path? What does the flow of the museum visitors do to someone who wants to move in a different direction? Are the visitors in that gallery basically observing the sense of direction in the gallery? Does the gallery provide its own entryway information (text/visual)? To what extent does that information pre-determine how you will “read” that gallery?

• Galleries and the public: How are gallery visitors expected to interact with the exhibits? Visually? Hands-on? Via sound? Via the written word? In some other way? Which exhibits are more likely to encourage hands-on participation? Which least likely?

• The exhibit space: Think about some individual exhibit cases and how they are set up. What are the organizing principles? What kinds of assumptions do the exhibit organizers make about the people who will be viewing the exhibit?

• Labels: Pay attention to the placement; content; information provided in labels. Is there too much or too little text? What do the labels assume about the museum visitor? What choices do the curators make by placing items in context, juxtaposition, or proximity to each other? If the exhibit uses cases, are they crowded or spare? If crowded, does it appear that way because of poor museum technique or because the curators are saying something about the artifacts exhibited? To what extent does the number of items in a case or objects in an exhibit lead you to value or ignore the items on display?

• The artifact: Artifacts are the objects on display in a museum. Are the artifacts in this exhibit unique, "authentic," reproductions? Why is the artifact included in the exhibit? For aesthetic reasons, educational reasons, or emotive reasons? To what extent does its placement in the exhibit answer these questions for you?

IV. The Visitor Experience

• Education and the museum: Is the educational purpose of the gallery, case, or museum evident to you? What does it say about how people learn? What are the basic educational techniques used to ensure that learning will occur?

• The visitors: What are the museum visitors doing? Get a sense of the demographics of the visiting population – who is there? Are people most often alone or in groups? Age, gender, race; can you tell anything about class? Are most visitors approaching the exhibits and/or the museum in the same way? Are they talking (about what?)? Do they adopt the “proper” museum-gaze in front of an artifact? Are there people there who seem to be using the museum in a different way? What are they doing? What are young children doing? Can you tell anything at all from observing the visitors about their purposes in coming to the museum? Do the visitors speak to the guards? The docents? Does the museum make any effort to segregate the visitors by age? What are the security guards doing? Who are they looking at?

• Feedback: Do visitors have the opportunity to provide feedback to the museum through comment cards, computers, postcards, etc. Are these located at the exit to the museum? In every gallery? In some galleries? By exhibits? Do you believe that the museum directors/curators care what the visitor thinks about the exhibits?

V. After the Visit

• Outside again: What is your immediate feeling on leaving the museum?

• Response & reflection: What do you think worked best about the exhibit? What would you recommend be changed?

• What kinds of narratives or relations of power are communicated by the exhibit and the overall museum? What basic narrative lines does the museum adopt? How are cultural differences made visible? To what extent are gender differences suggested by the museum display?

• Final thoughts: What was the overall purpose of the museum you just visited? What does the museum director want you to come away with? Who (really) is this museum for? Will you return? Who would you bring with you?

• Your critique will be graded based on:

  1. • The clarity and quality of your thesis (your critique needs to make an argument)

     • Your ability to offer an in-depth examination of one exhibit within the context of the museum overall

     • The use of evidence to support your claims, such as references to specific elements of an exhibit or specific aspects of museum design

     • Your attentiveness not only to the text in a specific exhibit, but to other elements that affect the museum’s message and meanings (the museum script)

     • Your use of course readings to contextualize your analysis where appropriate

     • Quality and clarity of your writing

Your critique should be 1200-1500 words (around 5 pages). Please turn in critiques by uploading them to the course blackboard site. One museum critique is due by 5pm on October 14. A second is due by 5pm on November 18.