The Case Against the Museum Label

Nobody disputes that a museum label is useful. The complaint, made by curators as often as by visitors, is about what it does to the act of looking. Studies of visitor behavior report that most people read the label before they examine the object, and that the time then spent on the object itself is measured in seconds. The label has become the exhibit, and the thing beside it the illustration.

Defenders answer that the alternative is not pure attention but confusion. An unlabeled object in a case is an unanswerable question, and a visitor who cannot tell a ritual vessel from a cooking pot is not looking harder; the visitor is looking blankly, and then leaving. On this view the label is what makes attention possible at all.

Both arguments are probably right about different visitors, which is why the interesting experiments hide the label rather than remove it. A folded card, a panel at the end of the row, a second visit with a guide: each keeps the information available while making the visitor decide when to take it. The results are modest and consistent. Time spent on the object roughly doubles, and the recall of what the label said does not fall. What changes is the order, and the order turns out to be most of what was wrong.