Curator

Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater

and the Visitor Performance

• • • • •

Ken Yellis

Abstract There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people
think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the dif-
ferences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all
17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t
they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibi-
tions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of
visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For
many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none.
How can this be? ‘‘Museum-adept’’ visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in
which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the
non-museum-adept? Can the museum-adept teach us how to realize our medium’s
full potential?

• • • • •

We Lost It at the Movies

In his Museum News review of Night at the Museum, Jim Volkert notes that after the movie
opened, the American Museum of Natural History, where the film was set, ‘‘experienced
a 20 percent jump in attendance during the 2006 holiday season—50,000 more visitors
than the year before . . . . [M]aybe Hollywood is onto something. Maybe museums could
take the place of the hospital and precinct house as the favored location for intrigue,
action and last-minute saves’’ (Volkert 2007, 29).
Well, maybe, but I’m not hopeful. Except for the Night at the Museum series and
caper movies like The Hot Rock (1972), museums have not appeared in American movies

Ken Yellis (Kenyellis@aol.com) is the Principal of First Light Museum Consultants, 378
Gibbs Avenue, Newport, RI 02840.

87
88 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

nearly as often as one might expect. I don’t see that changing any time soon: Americans
don’t seem to perceive museums as settings in which their emotions can be stirred.
And when their emotions are stirred by emotionally laden scenes, it tends not
to have much to do with the museum qua museum. The most common exceptions
to this rule are the astounding breakthroughs—museum educators call them ‘‘aha
moments’’—that archeologists and paleontologists and art historians have when they
look at just the right object in just the right way; Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code comes
to mind.
Vanishingly less common, however, are scenes in which ordinary visitors have
such epiphanies. The more typical emotion-laden museum scene could be happening
almost anywhere. For example, in When Harry Met Sally (1989), the Temple of Dendur
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provides the stunning background for a scene in
which Billy Crystal teaches Meg Ryan the funny accent they will speak in for the rest of
the day and, using that accent, awkwardly asks her on a date. I suspect that for most
moviegoers this touching moment pales beside Meg Ryan’s faked orgasm in the Stage
Deli, but I suspect the Dendur scene did the Met no harm.
The Met also provides—or seems to—a more sinister background in Brian de
Palma’s cheesy 1980 thriller, Dressed to Kill. In a febrile sequence, Angie Dickinson
becomes pursuer-pursued in a sexual cat-and-mouse game in what we are supposed to
take for the Met’s paintings galleries. But while the exterior shots were indeed taken at
the Met, the interiors were shot in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have been told that
by the time the Metropolitan withdrew permission for interior filming, the movie was
too far along and the budget too far gone for de Palma to move his story to Philadel-
phia.
Well, what difference does it make? Is this case of mistaken identity, as painful as it
may be for museum folks, any more consequential than other hilarious continuity errors
in movies: say, the appearance of Pacific Bell public telephones in what is supposed to
be Dulles Airport in Die Hard 2 (1990)? Is it even a problem?
I think it is. There are maybe 17,500 museums in this country; if people think these
institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between
them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that we really need all 17,500.
And these days, it seems to me, that is potentially a very great problem. Have we contrib-
uted to the problem? Perhaps.

A Museum for Every Mood?

I think you could have a museum for each mood . . . from the reverent to the playful . . . You
can’t really design one museum that would meet everyone’s needs all the time.
—Focus group participant, 19841

Museums have long focused on cognitive learning, trying to make Indiana Jones-like
‘‘aha’’ moments happen to real people in real life. But ‘‘aha’’ is not my only emotion,
and cognitive acquisition is not my only or even my most important goal in museum
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 89

visits. Nor do I think I am unusual in that regard. Have we devoted enough attention to
the full repertoire of feelings visitors might experience? I think not.
As the epigraph suggests, some visitors figure it out for themselves. But is there
something we can do to help them—or help more of them? It is well-studied that, for
many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for others few or none.2 But how
can this be, when museums are so numerous and—to those of us who know them—so
diverse and so wonderful?
I started thinking about this when I was conducting focus groups and interviews
with frequent museum-goers in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1980s. I have hesitated
to publish this data, in part because I have never been sure it was data. But the experience
has influenced the path and shape of my work in two respects. One was professional:
My focus shifted from the cognitive dimension of exhibitions and programs toward the
affective, and I started to try to understand how to create the immersive and transforma-
tive experiences people were describing. The other was more personal: I had always
thought museums took themselves too seriously; I now suspected that perhaps they
didn’t take themselves nearly seriously enough.
A lot of the people
I was talking to told me
that their emotional lives
had been and continued
to be enriched by muse-
ums, which was thrilling
to hear. It was also
potentially very helpful
to hear them talk about
how that happened. For
example, I encountered
Both photos on this page: Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal at the at least one woman and
Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, two men who went to a
in When Harry Met Sally (1989). Photos courtesy of Photofest Inc. museum or gallery pretty
90 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

much every day of their lives, and several others who were almost at that level. Even
in Washington, a museum-dense environment with many free options, this devotion
constituted an impressive commitment of time and energy. What were they getting
out of it?

The Inner Lives of the Museum-adept

These folks, whom I call the museum-adept, are themselves a minority of a minority, a
sub-group of the population. They are very skilled at deriving an enormous amount
from—and often finding much to quarrel with—the museum experience. Museums
mean a lot to them and they think about them, especially about the difference between
their potential and their reality. They reported, for example, that museums often don’t
communicate what they are about very well; their very titles can be misleading or cryptic.
The museum-adept deplore signs of neglect as evidence of a museum’s failure to
discharge its responsibility to the objects and because it spoils the presentation. They
actually like to see guards and other forms of security as a way of emphasizing that these
objects are important and valuable and that we are discharging our responsibility to
posterity; for them, these also contribute to the aura of ‘‘museum-ness.’’3
One respondent reported to me, ‘‘I am very pleased to see [a well-mounted instal-
lation] . . . to see that we are actually taking care of something that is several thousand
years old.’’ Another said, ‘‘there is a sense of pride’’ or even patriotism involved in such
care. ‘‘Presentation is, to me, very, very important,’’ offered another. ‘‘It is equally impor-
tant as what is on display.’’ Said still another, ‘‘It makes the value of the treasures more
meaningful when they take care of them . . . . You’re really keeping a record of civiliza-
tion, of man’s ability to create.’’
For these folks, it appears that museums are bound up with their sense of what it
means to be a human being, to be connected to the world, to help make sense of their
own experience, to experience things they have not experienced and would not otherwise
be able to experience. They like a sense of story or, perhaps, coherence; it helps them
to know that there is some kind of intentionality, even if its specific details elude
them. Museums give them a sense of connectedness, a different way of looking at
things—and insight, a word we will be coming back to.4
For me, a no-doubt over-eager listener, Nelson Graburn’s concept of a reverential
dimension of museum-going emerged powerfully. Museums, said one participant, ‘‘are
almost sacred places . . . repositories of culture’’ (Graburn 1984, 180). Words like rever-
ence, awe, and inspiration surfaced quite spontaneously as people described their feel-
ings. I was told often of powerful mystical or religious experiences in museums and
similar places, of enveloping or upwelling emotions of great intensity. One cannot imag-
ine a non-adept feeling elated by a solitary, unstructured, or unprepared experience, but
the museum-adept seem to have them all the time. They are prepared for such experi-
ences, eager for them, and reported many of them to me, often in vivid detail—although
they could often not remember whether someone else was with them at the time, which
I found diagnostic but am not sure of what.
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 91

A number spoke of exhibitions that provided unique, once-in-a-lifetime experi-

ences and cited those exhibitions—and, indeed, whole museums—as significant cultural
and historical and personal events. Nor were these reactions confined to their encounters
with great art in the context of great art museums; the adept reported deeply felt, albeit
different, reactions in history and science museums as well. One said of the National Air
and Space Museum, for example: ‘‘None of the other museums quite wows me like [it]
does. This sounds maybe a little loony, but going to see both of those movies at Air and
Space to me is about the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had. It was almost
an experience of . . . museum-goers merging with the exhibit.’’5
Indeed, the museum-adept seem quite consciously to classify or typify muse-
ums according to the moods they evoke and the emotional needs they are capa-
ble of satisfying. While viewers of Dressed to Kill may not appreciate that every
museum is unique, the museum-adept prize this uniqueness almost above all else.
For them, museums are a form of theater in which the varieties of human
experience and the complexities of the world are staged for them in ways they
find intriguing and helpful, inspiring and stimulating, seductive, and sometimes
powerful.

Staging the Visitor Experience

The museum-adept seem—much, I think, as museum people do—to prize museums as

theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, where they
can experience immersion in and connection to something larger than themselves,
where a kind of grace is offered, where they can have what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls
‘‘flow experiences’’—where, for a time, they find liberation from drudgery, anxiety, and
the tyranny of the mundane (Csikszentmihaly 1990).
The language the museum-adepts used echoed the vocabulary of dramaturgy: they
spoke of the atmospherics of the museum experience and its poetics. The museum-adept
attach great importance to the quality of feeling imparted by the physical environment:
the museum’s use of light and color, its openness or intimate charm, the sense of space
and the quality of its spaces, its warmth, cleanliness, meticulousness, its artful installa-
tions, and, of course, the careful and attractive presentation of the objects themselves. All
of these contribute to the museum gestalt and enable these visitors to access the immer-
sive experiences they seek.
Like theater, exhibitions are a ubiquitous and venerable medium and, like theater,
they can have a profound effect upon us at many levels. Exhibitions, like theater, can
change the way we feel and what we feel and the way we see and what we see. And we
have the testimony of visitors—and our own life experiences—to suggest that this hap-
pens at least some of the time.
But we also have the testimony of visitors and our own life experiences to sug-
gest that relatively few exhibitions accomplish this and even the best do not have that
kind of impact on all or even most visitors. Why not—and what can we do about it?
If exhibitions are a form of theater in which the visitor is the actor—as at least some
92 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

visitors seem to regard it—the question arises: Is there something about the nature of
the medium that will enable us to equip them to play their parts? What can we do
that would help us create such possibilities more of the time and also allow our audi-
ences—those we have and those we seek—to recognize and access them more readily?
There are at least two levels at which this issue can be addressed. One of these levels
is the outward form of the process, the organizational expression of project intent, which
begins with the question: If this is the desired outcome, what is the structure and process
that will get us there? The literature in this area is extensive; much thought has been
given to and much written about how to structure the exhibition development process
so as to further certain goals, and it is not necessary to dilate on that dimension here.
(See Kamien 2001; also the ExhibitFiles website, http://www.exhibitfiles.org/.)
The other level, the inward journey, has, I think, been less fully—and, more impor-
tantly, less explicitly—articulated. Yet however well-lubricated the machinery of exhibi-
tion development and production may be, and however skilled and ingenious the
practitioners involved, the ultimate physical reality—and, therefore, the visitor experi-
ence—will be shaped by a succession of choices made along the way, often on the basis
of tacit decisions about rules. Is there some way to stipulate a set of ‘‘decision rules’’ that
grow out of the essential nature of the medium in which we work and the specific
requirements of the particular expression of that medium in any given case? And if it is
possible, is it necessary?
The analogy to theater may be problematic, but it may be instructive in terms of
how members of the exhibition development team understand their roles—and what
role and which individual gets pride of place in the process. For example, if the curator
or subject matter specialist is the playwright, is the designer the director of the produc-
tion or merely the set designer? Is the museum director (or exhibits committee) the
dramaturge?
Analogizing our medium to theater may be problematic in another respect. In the-
ater or film or dance or opera—in one critical respect—there is usually one person who
is the visitor’s avatar, in charge of defining and actualizing the audience experience. How-
ever limited the authority may be in any given case, there is ordinarily one person
responsible for thinking holistically about the enterprise. It is almost never possible to
identify who that person is—or ought to be—in the universe of museums anymore.
The charismatic leader model is, for all intents and purposes, no longer sustainable,
although there appears to be no shortage of museum directors and boards attempting to
keep the dream alive.
If the model can no longer be sustained, however, the purpose it served—defining
our medium and imagining its full potential—still seems worthy, if for no other reason
than that the potential is so great and the reality so often disappointing. Can we, then,
give some thought to this question: If there were such a person in the process, what
would he or she be thinking? Can the process itself somehow incorporate that function?
What follows might be called a ‘‘process analysis’’6 or morphology designed to map the
journey of an exhibition from its notional state to its physical manifestation: a series of
conceptual and spiritual phases to be worked through by the exhibition development
team.
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 93

Who Are We, Who Are They?

There is a question no museum visitor should ever have to ask: What is the question to
which this exhibition is the answer? One doesn’t have to be a cynic to suspect that visitors
ask it all the time—or variations of it—but we in the field don’t necessarily learn of it.
The best way to avoid this calamity is for the museum to ask and answer these
questions itself:
1. What is the main reason we are doing this?
2. Is this story new?
3. If not, do we have a new take on it?
4. Why are we doing it now?
5. Why is it here?
6. Why this approach?
7. How does it relate to everything else around it?
8. How will it connect with the lives—interior and exterior—of our visitors?
Question 1 is partly about mission in general, partly about the specific goals of par-
ticular projects. We can never take it for granted that everything we want to do is within
the confines of our missions; if it is time to revise the mission statement because there
are too many projects outside its borders, this is a really good way of finding that out.
But I have in mind something more concrete than that. It is not enough to think some-
thing is a good idea. You have to be really clear about why.
As to questions 2 and 3, it is certainly much easier to persuade visitors that the
museum is telling a story for the first time if that is in fact the case. For that reason, a
healthy exhibition program needs a strong research base. It is also true that exhibitions
are one of the main expressive forms of the inner life of museums—if they have one.
Beyond this, however, any major project—and, indeed, entire exhibition pro-
grams—should come out of and draw strength from two other kinds of research
broadly construed or, at least, serious thinking and inquiry: the kind of self-analysis
and self-reflexiveness that enables you to address questions 4–7 convincingly; and
the kind of audience research that enables you to address question 8 no less con-
vincingly. Think of it as exercise—this is how exhibition programs build fitness and
add muscle.

Shaping the Story

In order for the visitor to recognize and play his role, he has to recognize that there is a
story to be part of, to connect with. For me, the most successful exhibits have strong and
clear storylines; the story has a shape and structure—usually a beginning, a middle, and
94 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

an end, more or less in that order, though not necessarily and not always; at times, there
may be major benefits to be derived from playing with sequence, juxtaposition, chronol-
ogy, and so on.
Beyond this, successful exhibits are permeated by and layered with story. Every-
where you look, everywhere you go, there is something to immerse yourself in, some-
thing to go deeper into, something to surround and support and involve you. Most
interesting of all, the stories are all true, or at least we think so, and, hopefully, are unique
stories that have never been told before—or, at least, never told in this way.
No less important is what might be called bounding or constraining the story.
Everything should be there that needs to be there, certainly, but nothing should
be there that doesn’t, for several reasons. From the perspective of the development
process, bounding concentrates energies and resources and liberates them. Figuring
out what is not the story is thus not just an important intellectual step: it is a
critical management tool, optimizing resource allocation and facilitating quality
control.
Bounding may be even more important to liberating the visitor experience. It helps
ensure that there are fewer seams—that is, poorly joined elements—that will be encoun-
tered along the way, fewer bare patches, fewer incongruities, less to be explained away or
rationalized. What’s been pared away, quite as much as what remains, cues the visitor to
the contours of the story and smoothes the process of orientation. Understanding the
story’s topography and geography, its unique shape and structure, the visitor is freer to
surrender to the experience.

Setting the Stage

The next stage of the process concerns clarifying and shaping the visitor experience you
seek to enable, which starts by giving the project its correct name. Peter Liebhold has
noted that the choice of a title is usually the most postponed and neglected stage in an
exhibition’s development (2007). It can also be the most contentious—and it should be.
The struggle for the title should take place early in the exhibition development process
and it should be allowed to rage on until the will to fight is spent and the floor is covered
with blood.
There are several reasons for this. From the perspective of efficiency and project
management, it is far better to have your big fights at the beginning, before you have
exhausted the budget and run out the clock. Moreover, by requiring that the exhibit team
focus on what the exhibit is really about, the struggle for the title clarifies the decision
rules as the team sets about to devise a tone, style, and look for the exhibit (see below).
The struggle also establishes a basis for figuring out what needs to be included and what
has to be excluded, and for shaping the overall presentation. Finally, the struggle also
helps mold the team, teaching it how to work together and establishing a vocabulary
and rhythm for the project.
From the perspective of the visitor, the title gives you the name of the story. It can
help make clear what the exhibition is about—and also what it is not about—and who it
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 95

Angie Dickinson, in the taut thriller Dressed to Kill (1980), is pursued in the galleries of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Photofest.

is for. It gives the first clues as to the kind of experience that is available and how to pre-
pare for it. The title can also tell the visitor how the exhibition was conceived, how its
contents and objects were selected, what its focus and emphasis are, what the disciplin-
ary framework and point of view are. In the title the museum announces what it thinks
is interesting, relevant, and appropriate.
Of course, visitors may think very differently about this. However conscientiously
the internal process has wrestled with the name, the exhibition may yet fail to attract
its audience or the audience that is attracted may not connect with the experience; visi-
tors may not respond to the cues we think we are giving them. We should, therefore,
as a matter of course, at the end of the struggle try out the title or possible titles on
visitors.7
The title also indicates the worldview embodied in the project—the spiritual, intel-
lectual, emotional, perceptual context in which the story takes place—as well as the point
of view, the interpretive perspective from which the story is told. The visitors’ encounter
with an alien worldview can be disturbing, intriguing, but, perhaps, not wholly unex-
pected. In a sense it’s exactly why people go to museums, to encounter something differ-
ent, even challenging, in a low-risk setting. That encounter is an essential stage in the
visitor performance. Why would you be curious if you were not at least a little surprised,
bemused, irritated, challenged?8
As in conversation, the tone we use in an exhibit is a function of the situation, the
nature of the relationship we have or wish to have with the visitor, the desired outcome,
the story we have to tell, and, most importantly, whom we think we are telling it to. If
visitors are to assume their roles, they must recognize themselves in the tone we use.
While tone has to do with who we think our audience is, the role we are cueing
the visitor to play, style has to do with who we think we are, the kind of theater we are
96 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

trying to present—Steppenwolf or Royal Shakespeare Company—our sense of our place

in the scheme of things. Loren Baritz once defined style as point of view.9 Even establishing
that you have a point of view—let alone making explicit what it is—can be a huge step,
with both internal and external benefits. Internally, it opens up the process, making it
easier for others to participate in enabling that point of view to find its fullest and best
expressive form. Externally, of course, it’s even more important, cueing the visitor as to
who is doing the talking, where that person is coming from, and why the exhibition uses
the language it uses and looks the way it does.
Voice is related to style but refers more specifically to the subject of authorship. The
style is shaped by someone—an individual, a department, a group or team, a role or
function. Who is that? The visitor needs to know, in order to be better able to interpret,
react to, and process what is happening in the space. The idea of the museum as author
or voice only takes the visitor so far in his or her performance. I suppose I am arguing for
signed exhibitions, if for no other reason than it contributes mightily to the de-briefing
process (discussed below). But authorship also pays homage to the noble possibility that
what we do, while it may not be art, is a creative act in which human beings—often very
many of them—have engaged. Visitors need to know this—that what they are experi-
encing is not the result of chance or natural selection. It was made by someone for a
purpose.
Of course, one of the things that tells them there is some intentionality behind this
creative act of design is what the exhibition looks like. This idea is so simple-minded that
I hesitate to express it: exhibitions should look like what they’re about. All too often exhi-
bitions look like something other than what they’re about or they look like nothing in
particular. This is not helpful, on two accounts.
The first is that if exhibitions resemble each other too closely, it becomes danger-
ous—for the individual museum, for the field, and for the culture. It might lead to more
movies like Dressed to Kill. If visitors start getting déjà vu all over again, that can’t be good
for business.
On a higher plane, the look helps visitors figure out what the experience is
and how to access it. In order to enable visitor engagement, the way the exhibition
looks should reflect the uniqueness of the story it is telling, better enabling visitors
to play their roles, by, at a minimum, establishing for the visitor that he or she has
not seen this exhibition before and that, therefore, this can be a new experience. To
state the negative case helps explain why this is so critical. To involve visitors in try-
ing to figure out if they’ve seen an exhibition before is to waste their time and
squander our opportunity.
Every museum should have a visual vocabulary it works within and regular visi-
tors learn to decode over time, building their trust in the museum, their self-confi-
dence, and their skills and ease within museum spaces. If capacious enough, that
visual language will allow for substantial design variation and flexibility. Just as every
exhibition should be part of an overall program, its look should be within the bound-
aries of the museum’s way of showing, except when there are good reasons to deviate
and innovate.10
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 97

Cueing the Visitor

Visitors bring their own frames of reference to the museum (Doering and Pekarik 2000).
But few will do homework before the visit, although some will. Over the last three
decades, the field has appropriately given much emphasis to the pre-entry phase: orien-
tation, advanced organizers, wayfinding, and so on. But for many visitors, that attention
prior to entry comes too soon, like telling children about sex before they have become
curious.
Better too soon than too late in both cases, but there needs to be increased empha-
sis on equipping visitors once they are within the environment and need support. It is
not unreasonable to expect visitors to be capable of playing their role, but it is unreason-
able to expect them to do so without equipping them for it. The design and organization
of the exhibit itself must provide a supportive context.
How do we do that? One way is modeling: something has to show visitors how to
be successful, how to gain access to the experience, how to perform. Sensory cues and dra-
maturgy, which have to do with tapping into visitor feelings, are discussed below. Here I
want to refer to the practical problem of enabling visitors to make sense of the environ-
ment and mine it for what it has to offer. Here are some obvious examples of how to
think about that:
• Present things in enabling order, that is, present first that which is needed to make
sense of what will come later—vocabulary, geography, concepts, biography, etc.
• Display things as they are intended to be seen or understood, perhaps as they were
used, or juxtaposed with related objects or images;
• Use visual explanation wherever possible (Tufte 1983; 1990; 1997; 2006).
None of this has anything to do with dumbing down information or even with
over-simplified language, much less childish or silly explanations. On the contrary, it is
about bringing the visitor into the game.
It also works because it capitalizes on the great storytelling strengths museums
have. Detail is one. Detail distinguishes the way museums tell stories from the way theme
parks do, for example, or from the way virtually all of television does, except, of course,
for Ken Burns, who does video museums. Detail helps ensure visitors will never experi-
ence déjà vu, will never mistake this story for one they have heard before, will not have to
wonder if they have seen this exhibit before. Specificity of detail also provides visitors
with an irritant and a stimulus to go further and, most importantly, a method to do so.
Each detail builds a framework for gaining more insight. Success is cumulative; curiosity,
resourcefulness, and intelligence are rewarded.
Related to detail is critical mass, the exhibition’s gravity, which holds the visitor in
the experience long enough to surrender to it, to yield what I call hermetic consent. Critical
mass has more to do with the density or compression of the experience than its scale. For
many visitors, dense, rich, and textured exhibits are seductive, filled with emotional
energy and things to lose oneself in. They get the sense that something worth focusing
on is happening, that is the experience contains lots to see, lots to know, lots to feel, lots
98 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

to connect to. Compression makes it less likely visitors will lose their train of thought
as they move through the space or that their emotional connection to the story will be
broken.11
Linked to both detail and critical mass is authenticity, physical fidelity to the mate-
rial reality of the story, a characteristic of museum storytelling that visitors take for
granted. Their credulity puts a heavy burden—one we fail to discharge at our peril—on
us. This would not be so unfortunate if museums had done a better job explaining to
the public what it is they think they are doing when they create an exhibition. Whatever
the cause,12 one of more the unfortunate consequences of this failure is that much of the
public takes what museums mean to offer in a contingent, speculative, or provocative
spirit with a terrifying—and humbling—literal-mindedness. When museums lose sight
of this, they can get embroiled in controversy, and usually a not very productive kind of
controversy at that (see Yellis 2009).
Museums have been especially derelict in addressing the subject of de-contextual-
ization and re-contextualization. In museums, every object is wrenched out of its original
context and imbued with new meanings, subjected to a ‘‘double mystification,’’ in Nel-
son Graburn’s apt phrase.13 Should it be the visitor’s job to sort out what’s genuine and
what is spurious, or is it ours? Our task is to enable visitors to get into the story as quickly
and deeply as possible and to stay there until they’re done, confident—and therefore not
distracted—in their sense that they know the rules of the game. Anything that needs to be
explained away by an interpreter, guide, or label or that the visitor has to make an effort
not to see is a problem, an intrusion; it may only register subliminally, but it registers.

Feeding Our Senses, Engaging Our Emotions

It’s not enough, however, to remove distracters that undermine the experience; there
have to be attractors that reinforce it as well. Sensory cues—including the visual armory
we ordinarily use: the color, light, arrangement of objects in the space, shape of furniture,
demarcation of areas, size and arrangement of passageways—should reinforce the story
on both the conscious and subliminal levels.
But just as visitors have other emotions beside ‘‘aha,’’ they have other senses than
sight, and we need to feed those too. There are senses—especially taste and smell—that
are very difficult for us or unavailable altogether in many museum environments (but
not all). Others, notably touch, can be used in a controlled environment. Even where
touching is not permitted, our tactile sense is triggered by surface textures, materials used,
and other visual elements.
But another powerful sense, hearing, we barely engage at all. We tend to offer one
of two soundscapes: silence or cacophony. Yet movies and other visual media work hard
to develop sound tracks that convey subtle and not-so-subtle messages. Why don’t we
use music and other sound cues to help us shape the visitor experience, at least some of
the time?
With an exhibition, we don’t even always know where it begins and where it ends.
The experience can feel amorphous at the boundaries and shapeless inside. For me, what
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 99

I call sealing the envelope has to do with more than just the exclusion of distractions that
interfere with visitor concentration: the creation of a setting where what belongs inside
doesn’t leak out and what belongs outside doesn’t seep in. As with closing the doors,
dimming the lights and drawing the curtain in a theater, visitors to an exhibition need to
feel that they have crossed an emotional and physical threshold when they enter, that
they pass through a force field. Then they have some kind of experience. Then, at the
end, they go through a decompression chamber of some kind.

Closing the Curtain

But when does it end? When I travel, I generally do some reading beforehand, but in
recent years I have started to do more reading after the trip, when I have a much better
sense of what I am curious about and, more importantly, what will help me keep my
connection to the new place I have come to love.
I have the same reaction to exhibitions all the time—and I doubt I am unique.
However, even a well-executed exhibit may be hard to decode when you’re in it. Be
our visitors ever so clever and be there ever so much human intervention or interpre-
tive paraphernalia on the exhibit floor, visitors don’t make connections we thought
would be obvious, or they make connections we didn’t anticipate, often drawing from
life experiences or points of view we have no way to know about and that, from our
perspective, may not even be germane. Or they may not know how to feel or how to
react.
So how do we enable the visitor to extend or deepen or catalyze the experience or
bring closure to it? For most museums, that’s pretty much the gift shop, and that’s fine,
but there is much more that can be done. Maybe we need to be more involved in the vis-
itor exiting process, in order to shift our focus more from the front end to the back end
of the visitor experience. Public programs, membership desks, publications, podcasts,
DVDs, websites, newsletters, email blasts, and other kinds of exit or post-exit encounters
are among the strategies, but there are many more. Most people connect more readily to
people than to ideas, putting the subject of authorship, raised above, in a new light.
How can we enable visitors to connect with the people involved in the exhibition—or
just know that they can?14
Museums’ main strength is also their main weakness. No one ever has to go to
one, with the exception of children, who are routinely compelled to do so. In theory,
everyone who is there wants to be there. Moreover, museum-going is only occasionally a
response to a practical need.15 People tend to go to libraries or the Web when they need
information; they tend, in my view, to go to museums for something else, insight, per-
haps, or an experience of a different kind. Some of them, too, go to satisfy emotional
needs, to engage in some kind of performance, an inward as well as a physical journey
that, like a story, has a shape, a beginning, a middle, and, especially, an end.
This is where the analogy to theater seems to me most apt—and most unreal-
ized in the museum community. We don’t even have a taxonomy comparable to the
ways in which plays are classified—melodrama, comedy, tragedy, satire, and so
100 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

on—with which to arrange the kinds of experience we think we can provide. The
absence of such a nomenclature could either be the cause of or a factor contributing
to the seemingly most common failure of exhibitions, regardless of discipline: they are
uninflected, emotionally amorphous, offering little change of pace or sensation of arc
as visitors move through the space.
The use of dramaturgy in museums is a nontrivial task: it requires us to imagine the
visitors’ entire performance, not just their physical transit through the space. It requires,
too, as I have tried to suggest, that we think differently about this, our main expressive
form. If, indeed, exhibitions can have the transformational power of art, why don’t they
exercise that power more often? Can it be that it is because we have not fully understood
how they work as a medium?
Some visitors seem, as I suggest, to have discovered it for themselves. They seem to
understand better than we that exhibitions, while they can be very inefficient vehicles for
data transmission or skill acquisition, can warm your wintry heart, lift your downcast
spirit, soothe your aching soul, stir your languid conscience, or open your leaden eyes.
Have they been telling us this and we have failed to hear?

Acknowledgments

This article and a previous one for Curator: The Museum Journal, ‘‘Fred Wilson, PTSD,
and Me: Reflections on the History Wars’’ (Oct. 2008) are based on my work as a Public
Humanities Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center, Brown University, in 2007. A
version of this article was presented most recently at the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission Library in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, August 14, 2009. I would
like to express my appreciation to the editors and reviewers of Curator for their
thoughtful contributions toward strengthening this essay; its weaknesses are, of course,
my own.

Notes

1. From an unpublished focus group transcript, Washington DC. One-on-one

interviews and focus groups were conducted by the author in 1984 and 1985 in
Washington, DC, as part of coursework for a masters degree in Public Adminis-
tration at George Washington University. The focus groups were held at the Arts
and Industries Building, Smithsonian Institution, with support from the Smith-
sonian’s Office of Museum Programs.
2. The data in this area is sketchy. Of the various estimates of the percentage of the
population that attends at least one museum a year, the best recent one, dealing
with the 18-plus population, is the IMLS National Study (Griffiths and King
2006 ⁄ 2008). The data indicates that 68 percent of adults had visited at least one
museum in the previous 12 months (quoted in Office of Policy and Analysis
2009, 4–10).
CURATOR 53/1 • JANUARY 2010 101

3. My sense of the literature suggests that the same aspects of museum-ness that put
the adept at ease make the non-adept, whom I did not study, uncomfortable.
Already feeling unwelcome in many museums, the non-adept may see these
security measures as a lack of trust and a way of controlling their behav-
ior—which, of course, is exactly what they are (Prentice, Davies, and Beeho
1997, 45–70; Prince 1990, 149–168).
4. There is much in the literature about the importance of these connections; for a
start, see Silverman (2000, 230–239); Krauss (2005, 758–770); and Genoways
(2006).
5. See note 1.
6. I am indebted to Jane Bedno for this phrase.
7. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of Curator for emphasizing this impor-
tant point.
8. I am grateful to John Kemp of Plimoth Plantation for this insight.
9. Conversation with the author, spring 1967, Rochester, NY.
10. Space does not permit a discussion here of what those reasons might be.
11. Compression should be distinguished from the encrustation of exhibits with
layer upon layer of text and other interpretive paraphernalia, a longer discussion
than space permits here. In short, the difference might be compared to the dis-
tinction between armor and muscle. Armor doesn’t add strength; it’s a barrier to
ward off projectiles. But the more armor there is, the more muscle is needed, and
it is research that builds muscle.
12. Possible causes include: the non-self-reflexive character of the museum commu-
nity; the belief that this credulity benefits museums; the assumption that the
issue is not of interest or accessible to visitors; and indifference to this subject in
the lay media.
13. Umberto Eco (1990, 9–10) writes: ‘‘In the fusion of copy and original . . . the
great exhibit that reproduces completely the 1906 drawing room of Mr. and
Mrs. Harkness Flagler [in the Museum of the City of New York] is exemplary . . .
. Now that real fake, the 1906 home, is maniacally faked in the museum show-
case, but in such a way that it is difficult to say which objects were originally part
of the room and which are fakes made to serve as connective tissue in the room
(and even if we knew the difference, that knowledge would change nothing,
because the reproductions of the reproduction are perfect and only a thief in the
pay of an antique dealer would worry about the difficulty of telling them
apart).’’
14. In this regard, the recent trend of cloaking the staff from visitors to museum web-
sites would seem to be a movement in the wrong direction, although I am sure
there are sound arguments in favor of it.
15. For instance: providing a ‘‘worthwhile’’ place for parents to take children; main-
taining the best gift shop or bookstore in the community; serving as a venue for
social, philanthropic, and civic groups; and so on.
102 KEN YELLIS • CUEING THE VISITOR

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