Now that is Evidence: Tracking Down the Evil 'Whatever' Interpretation
For all you undergrads going into Museum Studies, or all you grad students who have to deal with survey level classes - this is a great piece that briefly describes the history of interpretation in academia, museums and museum visitors, and goes on to discus THE POINT in interpretation and that there IS A POINT to the history and the narrative that academia and museums teach us, and that it isn’t really acceptable to foster the idea that the visitor’s interpretation is entirely in their hands, that while interpretation shouldn’t be wholly academic, it shouldn’t be entirely individual interpretation as well.
Excerpt:
“Museums certainly do not spend billions and billions of dollars collecting things (objects, stories, histories, ideas), conserving and cataloguing these things, carefully researching, publishing, crafting messages, and writing the storylines for these things, only to have visitors make up “whatever” stories they please, stories that have nothing to do with the things and their stories. Yet the museum literature is saturated with statements such as Roberts’, in which the “whatever” interpretation is seen as positive (see Xanthoudaki’s 2005 edited volume for a recent example of how prevalent this notion is among practitioners and theoreticians). By placing interpretive authority in the hands of the individual, and further, by championing the “whatever” interpretation as the final and desired outcome of the museum visit, the museum not only justifies its failure to communicate, but also it absolves itself of any interpretive responsibility for the meanings it produces and circulates in culture.”
