Life Reflected Back, Loud and Clear

In 2018 I attended a conference of museum professionals exploring future directions for exhibition making.1 During the event, two curators from Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), delivered a presentation on their 2017 exhibition Who Decides? (fig.1).2 Showcasing the museum’s contemporary art collection, the exhibition was curated by Grace Todd, Senior Learning, Participation and Interpretation Officer, Nicholas Thornton, Head of Art, and ten service users, workers and volunteers from The Wallich, a Welsh charity supporting people with experience of homelessness.3 The Wallich group included individuals who had studied art at university as well as people who had never been to a museum before.4 The gallery text introducing their curatorial work read as follows:

As Todd explained to a lecture theatre filled with her peers, their intention was to make clear that ‘art belongs to us all’.

The Wallich co-curators, Colin Bainbridge, Helen Griffiths, Ian Harris, Heidi Jones, Michelle King, Dennis King, John Penhale, Michael Pugh, Stefan Rees Owen and Marith Williams, worked on the exhibition for nine months. The group met with museum professionals to view and discuss hundreds of contemporary artworks. The worklist was theirs to decide, and the interpretation theirs to write. Their names, photographs and biographies were displayed on the gallery wall, and their chosen artworks were presented alongside personal reflections, often explaining why they picked the work (fig.2). Included in the exhibition was George Shaw’s End of Care 2013 (fig.3). The painting, depicting the foundations of a care home after its demolition, was accompanied by a short interpretation text by Michael Pugh:

Pugh’s text does not follow the usual conventions of an artwork caption. It does not identify Shaw’s favoured medium, Humbrol enamel paint, usually used to paint scale model kits and toys. It does not note that the painting’s subject is located on Coventry’s Tile Hill housing estate, where the artist grew up. It does not draw attention to Shaw’s highly detailed painting style or the photographic quality of his work. Shaw’s 2011 Turner Prize nomination does not get a mention, nor does his MA at London’s Royal College of Art. Beyond the ‘tombstone’ label – which includes basic information such as the artist’s name and the artwork’s title and date – the painting is presented without any reference to its maker, the socio-political context of its production or its materiality. An introductory text at the start of the exhibition offered an explanation of Pugh’s approach: ‘Have you ever found yourself in front of a work of art trying to make sense of it? All too often we look to museum labels as the magic code that will help us unlock the meaning. Guess what – you are the connection!’

Back at the conference of arts professionals, the presentation ended and an audience member raised their hand, ready to ask the first question to the museum curators: ‘But what about your normal visitors? What are you offering them?’

In 1991 Elaine Heumann Gurian contributed an essay to Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine’s Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Over three decades later, ‘Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities’ remains on many museum studies reading lists. Drawing on decades of experience as a museum consultant and senior executive, Gurian writes: ‘We espouse the goal of enlarging our audiences to include underserved populations and novice learners, and yet we continue not to accommodate them: we demand that they accommodate us and then wonder why they do not visit our galleries’.7

If we follow Gurian’s argument, the curators of Who Decides? cast aside the conventions of artwork caption writing to accommodate underserved audiences (fig.4). Rather than sharing contextual information, the texts prioritised the curators’ personal connections with the artworks. Who Decides? offered new interpretations of contemporary art by placing the visitor’s and the curators’ experience of, and connection with, the artwork at the centre of the exhibition.

At a time when the museum was reaching more than 500,000 visitors annually, the ten-month exhibition received over 96,000 visitors.8 A report by the Museums Association notes that ‘visitors commented on how refreshing the interpretation was due to the opinions, stories and connections’, and that the external co-curators felt ‘transformed’ by the process.9 However, subsequent displays of Amgueddfa Cymru’s collection of contemporary art have returned to more conventional modes of interpretation. Artworks are accompanied by captions sharing information about the artist’s life and the making of the work, or by no interpretative text at all. The ‘normal’ offer has been resumed.

Gurian argues that most exhibition makers are aware of modes and strategies of presentation that might empower their publics, but they fail to employ them. ‘Appealing directly to the emotions is considered pandering to the mob’, she notes, and there is a belief that ‘informality would reduce the importance of the work’.10 Perhaps the audience member at the conference felt that Pugh’s text was failing Shaw’s painting. But the language they used in their question (and the tone in which it was delivered) suggested their main concern was the interruption of their expected exhibition experience. For Gurian, this reveals something about status in the museum:

Perhaps what was most unsettling for the audience member was the disruption of their exclusive domain. And few domains are more exclusive than the discourse surrounding the visual arts.

This discourse, which might be broadly defined as art writing, is distinct from the practice of museum interpretation. While it has roots in Giorgio Vasari’s artist biographies, Denis Diderot’s reviews of Paris Salons, the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, and the essays of Clement Greenberg and Susan Sontag, interpretation is written (and sometimes recorded and produced) for the general public, not the academy. Its most-cited voices are interdisciplinary practitioners who have held curatorial roles, fostered new approaches to visitor studies and become museum studies educators.

Alongside Gurian and her editors, Karp and Lavine, figures including Jeffrey K. Smith, Beverley Serrell and Nina Simon in the United States, and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Richard Sandell, Sara Wajid and Rachael Minott in the United Kingdom, have highlighted the role interpretation plays in opening up the museum, shifting focus from collections to visitors and supporting new and critical museology. Drawing on pedagogy, sociology and psychology, and informed by queer, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial thought, these practitioners are part of a rich field striving to find new ways of talking about art and engaging audiences.

Multivocal interpretation, produced by multiple, named authors from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, is often heralded as a means of making interpretation more ‘inclusive’. Interpretation text is often written in institutional voice, a nameless, unseen voice of authority that conjures the gravitas of the ‘voice of god’ narrator in television and film. By providing multiple voices, and by introducing them to visitors, and explaining their relevance, authority is shared and new perspectives are welcomed. In 2021 Tate Britain trialled such an approach in its exhibition Hogarth and Europe. It presented perspectives and commentary from academics, historians and artists alongside texts by exhibition curators to offer ‘new ways of looking at these artworks, enriching our understanding of Hogarth’s incredible body of work’.12 The exhibition celebrated the artist’s ability to capture and satirise the shifting social politics of eighteenth-century Europe, highlighting ‘opportunities and innovation, materialism, exploitation and injustices, which continue to resonate today’.13 By using contemporary voices, the museum could point to Hogarth’s continued relevance while introducing perspectives absent from the artist’s body of work and dominant readings of his practice. Yet, instead of opening Hogarth’s work up to new audiences, these texts – written by experts rather than the non-specialist contributors in Who Decides? – were perceived as ‘didactic’.14 In a review for the i Paper Hettie Judah writes that

Multivocal captions may offer a means of achieving greater epistemic diversity in museums with colonial roots, but Hogarth and Europe demonstrated that while such captions are capable of addressing glaring absences in dominant art historical narratives, they can still reproduce the exclusivity of the field. The authority of Tate’s chosen voices was not the only factor that limited the potential of multivocal interpretation to make artworks more accessible. The language in those ‘wordy’ texts had a part to play.

In 2013 the sociologist Alix Rule and the artist David Levine published their text ‘International Art English. On the rise – and the space – of the art-world press release’.16 By analysing thirteen years’ worth of announcements on the art publishing platform e-flux, the authors identified common ‘lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features’ across international press releases for contemporary art events.17 Rule and Levine uncover more than commonalities; they evidence the emergence of a new language, ‘International Art English’ or ‘IAE’, which they describe as a ‘collision’ between mid-twentieth-century formalist art criticism and continental philosophy.18

The appeal of IAE, the authors note, is that it allows its users to ‘signal the assimilation of a powerful kind of critical sensibility’, one that is ‘rigorous, politically conscious, probably university trained’.19 In the context of decades of tabloid criticism denouncing contemporary art practice as something ‘my five-year-old could have done’, IAE appears to offer a means of legitimising both the artwork and the commentator. The reliance on IAE also reveals a lack of confidence in contemporary art. The paper asks: ‘If press releases could not telegraph the seriousness of their subjects, what would they simply say? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?’20

Rule and Levine’s text skewers IAE, sardonically holding a mirror up to contemporary art writing, asking what ‘globality’, ‘potentiality’ and ‘experiencability’ really mean, and how we ended up ‘writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French’21 But, the writers note, ‘there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved’.22

In issue 45 of e-flux journal, the artists and writers Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl respond to Rule and Levine’s text. Rosler fears that Rule and Levine’s critique of contemporary art writing seeks to prove that ‘theoretical discourse, or the very enterprise of theory, is a sham and a shame’, while questioning which discourses and fields they hope to discredit.23 Steyerl’s essay serves as an important reminder that while art history may now claim to embrace artists and artworks from across the globe, its story is still written in English. She notes that the press releases Rule and Levine analyse are ‘typically written by overworked and underpaid assistants and interns across the world’, and argues that their deviance from ‘conventional highbrow English’ should be encouraged. Directly quoting the cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto, Steyerl writes that ‘nothing truly important can be said without wreaking havoc on the rules of grammar’.24 Yet neither the expertise Rosler advocates for nor the different forms of learning Steyerl invites are easily found in IAE.

As this game of linguistic one-upmanship has moved from journals to artist statements, into press releases and finally onto gallery walls in public institutions, it has reached the scrutiny of ‘broader audiences’. Those unaccustomed to its performative style of writing are left sidelined. They are unable to decode its vocabulary or mimic it to join the conversation, and they are unmoved by its theoretical references or radical politics. IAE signals that the text and the artwork it discusses are not for them.

It would be unfair to suggest that the interpretation texts in most art museums read like e-flux announcements, but public museums undeniably use language and references that performatively signal the seriousness of their artworks. The museum professional Seema Rao has worked at the interstices of visitor experience, education and technology for twenty years. In her 2018 behind-the-scenes account of label (or what I would call caption) writing, Rao acknowledges that ‘museum labels are often written for highly informed museum-goers’.25 She notes:

So, Rao asks, what is the problem? Why would anyone want to challenge the conventions of caption writing? The problem is that most of the texts accompanying artworks serve those who are already in the building – visitors who often have the experience, expertise and cultural capital to engage with an artwork without the support of our caption text. As Rao puts it:

By neglecting to write for the majority of our potential visitors, we are letting down our institutions. In the United Kingdom, public museums and galleries have spent the last fifteen years developing programmes designed to invite new audiences into their spaces.28 Yes, because art is ‘for everyone’, but also because new audiences mean new income streams for underfunded public institutions. Family workshops, initiatives made for and with young people, exhibitions that disrupt dominant art historical narratives and events that present museums as civic and social spaces have all brought first-time visitors across the threshold.29

But the work required to help these new visitors engage with the artworks on the walls is hotly contested. If the museum ‘panders to the masses’, will it alienate its ‘normal’ audience? For artworkers who care about non-specialist audiences, perhaps the more pertinent question is what it means for the art museum to treat those it has wilfully ignored ‘differently’ from those it has accommodated for generations? If exhibitions of artworks and artists that have been historically overlooked are staged without the pomp and circumstance of blockbuster solo shows of celebrated and canonised artists, do they compound historical failures? Does it tell new audiences that the art they have come to see, the art that speaks to their experiences, their life, their culture, is less important?

As someone who has spent over a decade writing and editing interpretation texts for museums and galleries, I have lost count of how often I have asked curators to treat artists and artworks with parity. But this means something specific in a museum where interpretation editors regularly delete descriptors like ‘important’, ‘renowned’ and (worst of all) ‘seminal’, and quite another in the wider art world. If Tate has spent more than one hundred years asserting the importance of a small group of white men who made art in Rome, Paris, Berlin, London and New York, is it necessary to signal the importance of other artists too?

Between 2014 and 2025, I worked in the Interpretation team at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Tate boldly states its desire to ‘welcome audiences that better reflect our nation and attract a diverse international public’ and, since 2019, has noted its intention to ‘serve as an artistically adventurous and culturally inclusive art museum for the United Kingdom and the world’.30 Through my role as Curator in Interpretation, I worked with colleagues to better understand the part Tate’s institutional voice plays in its ability to meet these objectives. Following interventions by colleagues such as Hassan Vawda, the former co-chair of Tate’s BAME staff Network (Black and Minority Ethnic; recently renamed REACH, Race, Equality, and Cultural Heritage), and in response to the work of academics and museum professionals like the anthropologist Wayne Modest, the museum began re-examining the stories it tells and the language it uses to tell them.

As Modest notes in his 2018 publication Words Matter, ‘paying attention to language means acknowledging that the language we use affects whether groups feel a sense of belonging to society. This, then, is a battle over representation, recognition and respect’.31 Instead of focusing on the language the institution used to signal the importance of its collection, largely the remit of communications and marketing rather than interpretation, I prioritised the language we used to talk about people – the artists who make the artworks, the subjects they represent and the audiences their artworks engage.

Keen to build on the lessons learned from Tate exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 2017 and Queer British Art 2017, both of which actively invited new audiences into the galleries, I began keeping a record of language use at Tate.32 Informed by exhibition research, conversations with colleagues and guidance from other relevant organisations, I took note of developments in language and terminology. I recorded decisions to describe activist rebellions as ‘uprisings’ not ‘riots’, remove gendered language and use person-centred terms and endonyms – a self-chosen name of an individual, a group of people, a place, language or dialect – to describe communities. The hope was that more accurate and appropriate language would help more people feel welcome in the galleries, and that capturing best practice would prevent repeating past mistakes.

Inspired by Modest’s publication, this record became the ‘Rethinking Language Glossary’, a living document suggesting alternatives for outdated, offensive or misused terms. The glossary was not, and could never be, comprehensive. Language, particularly language related to identity, is complex, ever-changing and highly subjective. As such, the entries included did not always provide simple answers; instead, they invited users to consider other perspectives and encouraged them to make informed decisions about their language use. They noted the exhibitions, displays and programmes where outdated terms were challenged and new ones introduced, explaining why particular language caused offence, and why alternatives were preferred. In 2021, after four years of sporadic edits and additions, the glossary was formally shared across the institution. Three years later, in 2024, Tate Language Group was established to support its maintenance and ensure its rigour. The time this process took reveals the difficulty of enacting change across a large institution and speaks to the deep thought, discussions and consideration required to create a process agile enough to address something as mercurial and deeply personal as language. In my introduction to the glossary, I wrote the following:

Of course, replacing outdated and offensive terms with person-centred language does not produce an inclusive story of art. This was work driven, informed and necessitated by curatorial programmes that challenged biased and ill-informed histories of art. A single document shared on an organisation’s intranet cannot ensure that all content produced across a multi-site national museum is inclusive (if inclusive content is even possible). But this work was grounded in the understanding that language can make a difference, and that when institutions tell inclusive stories of art, they create more inclusive spaces for their audiences.

Museum workers across the sector have spent more than a decade attempting to change the language we use to talk about art, from community-derived terms to less formal vocabulary. And while mistakes will always be made, and are an essential part of change, there are clear indications that there have been improvements in the readability and inclusivity of the language used in museums. Yet, when it comes to the content of our texts, I am not sure much has changed. While art institutions like Tate claim to ‘offer visitors multiple points of engagement with [their] collection and ideas about art’, are we as museum workers really writing content that addresses the needs and interests of audiences from different walks of life?33

Like many museums and galleries, Tate offers bespoke family-focused displays and exhibitions (such as UNIQLO Tate Play), and just like these institutions, Tate’s ‘general’ interpretation is written for a ‘general’ audience.34 Yet the content of these texts appears to address people with years of experience visiting their sites, visitors who need less interpretive scaffolding than those encountering the collection for the first time. It seems there is reluctance among museum workers across many professions (not just curators) to change the way we write about art. Many museum professionals have multiple degrees’ worth of specialist knowledge about the history, materiality and significance of their institution’s collections, and perhaps there is a sense of duty to share that knowledge to enhance public understanding of art. But when we emphasise the importance of information, we encourage intellectual engagement with art. Is that what we really want? Is that what first-time visitors to our galleries need?

In her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, the writer Susan Sontag argues against the prioritisation of information and meaning over experience.35 ‘By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that’, she claims, ‘one tames the work of art’. Sontag continues:

There have been changes in art museum practice over the last ten years that have helped audiences see, hear and feel more. Exhibitions and acquisition programmes challenging dominant art historical narratives that have failed to recognise the role of women, people of colour, queer and disabled artists, offer fuller accounts that allow many more people to see themselves represented on the gallery walls. More considered approaches to language that respect and acknowledge the identities of artists, subjects and audiences, build trust and encourage visitors to let their guard down so they might feel more.

Perhaps this work, drawing on generations of activism and scholarship, has already gained significant ground towards Sontag’s assertion that the ‘aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us’.37 But so often, in an attempt to do justice to the stories previously absent from and ignored by our institutions, we feel we must write more to right these historical wrongs. We share the biography of the artist who has been waiting decades for institutional recognition, and we note where their work sits in relation to the art historical canon from which they were excluded. We outline their networks and influences, and highlight the communities they belonged to. We discuss the significance of their work using the same erudite language we always have. Surely that is the right and equitable thing to do? We are willing to make changes to our ways of working that attempt a form of justice for these artists, but where’s the justice for the audiences we have previously excluded? What we rarely do is leave space for the reader of our texts to experience the artwork on their own terms.

As Rule, Levine and Gurian suggest, to leave space requires trust, trust that the artwork can engage audiences without (too much) intervention, and trust that the audience is capable of engaging. In 2025, as my final project at Tate, I convened two workshops titled Inclusive Practice in the Art Museum: Writing for Audiences and Artists. Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the convenings were designed to facilitate transatlantic practice sharing, bringing together artists, academics, curators and interpretation specialists across the UK and the US to discuss past practice and future opportunities.

Through a series of papers and discussions, we considered the role interpretation plays in producing more inclusive experiences in the museum, and our responsibilities to artists and audiences alike. We reflected on the difficulty of the work; the labour so often demanded of workers of colour and those whose identities are underrepresented in the sector; the impact of changing political environments; the importance of action over rhetoric; and the need for collectivity and solidarity. Oriana Elisa Gonzales, Associate Educator of Interpretation, Research and Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, discussed the group to the writing of the educator Maxine Greene. In Releasing the Imagination (1995), Greene considers opportunities for learning outside traditional classrooms. Gonzales shared the following quote:

To return to Who Decides?, Pugh and his co-curators did not engage with their chosen artworks with detachment; they brought their whole selves to the encounter and found particular and deeply personal resonances. They were able to do so because the museum made space for them ‘in their integrity’; they saw them as ‘big’.

When new visitors enter our galleries, people whose backgrounds, experiences, cultures and identities have historically been underrepresented in art museums, how do we see them? When they are met by texts written for people who have been ‘superserved’ by these institutions, those with specialist knowledge, those who have always seen themselves reflected on the walls, those who understand the conventions of art writing, we create a barrier for engagement. Not because these ‘new’ audiences don’t understand the vocabulary used but because an artwork’s place in the art historical canon and the particularities of an artist’s education will not mean much to many people. And the more we say, the less time they have to look.39 The longer audiences spend making sense of our texts, trying to understand what makes this work as important as its lengthy caption suggests, the harder it becomes for them to engage with the work and experience it all.

In Pugh’s caption, he confidently states that Shaw’s painting ‘connects’ with him. Interestingly, this connection is something the artist claims has evaded him in the past.

For those of us familiar with the range and diversity of works displayed in art museums like the National Gallery and Tate, it is hard to imagine anyone, let alone a celebrated artist like Shaw, failing to find works that reflect their life back to them. But it might not be so difficult to believe that the texts accompanying those artworks could dampen those reflections. The irony is that most writers of gallery interpretation, whether curators, art historians or interpretation specialists, claim that the purpose of their texts are to encourage audiences to look. The caption should act as a bridge between the viewer and the artwork. Interpretation should help audiences find connections. As Sontag notes, these texts should ‘make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us’.41

If we can write texts that cut back on the ‘artspeak’, prioritise experience over information, place more importance on people than art history and leave space for our visitors in their integrity, interpretation can play a vital role in making audiences feel welcome and included in our institutions (fig.5). It can help visitors connect with an artwork and encourage them to find resonances with their own lives. Perhaps that is what turns ‘new audiences’ into return audiences, when they see their lives reflected back, loud and clear.