How much explanation is necessary? That depends on the essay and the essayist. At a minimum, enough information should be provided to link the object with other information the viewer might have. Not everyone can identify every object in every cultural tradition. There is a theory that art and objects can transcend culture, but there is no evidence to support this theory. Once we suspect that an object was made by an intelligent entity, we want to know more. Why was the object made? Who made it? Was it common or exceptional? Were their others like it? How as it made? People who don’t ask questions like this tend not to go to museums.

I have been to exhibits that offer biographies, travelogues, manufacturing guides, technological histories, vignettes, political critiques and countless other analogs to familiar literary forms. The wonderful variety is one of the great reasons for going to a museum in the first place.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/warphotography-interview-with-simon.html
Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG posted an interview with Simon Norfolk the other day. I thought Norfolk gave an interesting example:

“And unless you can really understand what the fellow stood for, how can you comprehend what his ideas were about? How can you judge whether his paintings were good paintings or rubbish paintings?

The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world. Without that passion, that political drive, to a piece of work – and I mean politics here very broadly – how can you ever really evaluate it? At the end of the day, I don’t think my politics are very popular right now, but what I would like to hear is what are your politics? Because if you’re not going to tell me, how can we ever possibly have an argument about whether you’re a clever person, your work is great, your work is crap, your art is profound, your art is trivial…?

For instance, I’m doing a lot of work these days on Paul Strand – and Paul Strand is a much more interesting photographer than most people think he is. The keepers of the flame, the big organizations that hold the platinum-plating prints and his photogravures, or whatever – these big museums, particularly in America, that have large collections – they don’t want the world to know that Strand was a major Marxist, his entire life. He was a massive Stalinist. That just dirties the waters in terms of knowing who Strand was. So Strand has become this rather meaningless pictorialist now. You look at any description of Strand’s work, and he was just a guy who photographed fence posts and little wooden huts in rural parts of the world. If you don’t understand his politics, how can you make any sense of what he was trying to do, or what he photographed? These people have completely laundered his reputation – completely deracinated the man.”

I think this ends up leading almost to ideas of censorship. Who decides what information a viewer should and shouldn’t get immediately upon reaching a piece? Who decides what’s important enough to stick next to the art? Who decides the format, the placement?

If a piece is more of a free-form aesthetic one, then I wonder what the context of it’s aesthetic is? Is art-as-meaningless-decoration that’s pretty to stare at still contextualized by concepts of ‘pretty’?

Does the artist decide that the viewers personal interpretation is the contextualizing act itself? If so (and if they were curating their own show) then I imagine they would choose not to put any text about the piece there. They would be making a choice to make the viewers act of perceiving, the act of contextualizing, the act of making meaning. The question is, what do you do about all the other art-with-context pieces in the world? If we leave them without their originating context, it completely changes our methods of judgement and our ability to communicate.

Translate that process to art, and that’s what I’d like a museum’s explanations to do for me.

My problem with wall text is that it’s so small. I have to lean way in to be able to read it. I get in the way of other viewers. They make it small so it won’t distract from the painting, but reading it now becomes more of a chore than looking at the painting.

Also. Some stuff about the painting I’m not going to get on my own. Voice of Fire, for example. What’s the point? Is the part of a movement? Is the artist making a statement? It says nothing to me without context (and context is, of course, the key to understanding meaning in art).

So, give me my wall text. Just make it bigger, so I can read it.