Who Writes the Card on the Wall? Somebody Making a Great Many Decisions
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The small card beside a work tells visitors what to look at and how to think about it in fifty words or fewer, and every choice in it is contested. Museums argue about these more than about almost anything else.
What it has to do
A label carries a small quantity of information and a large quantity of framing. It must identify the object, which means artist, title, date and materials at minimum, and that identification is itself a set of claims that may be uncertain or disputed. It must supply whatever context a visitor needs to make sense of what they are seeing, in an amount that can be read standing up in under a minute. It must do that for an audience of unknown knowledge, from a specialist to somebody who has never been in a gallery. And it must not tell the visitor what to think while inevitably doing exactly that by choosing what to mention.
The layers of text
Interpretation in a gallery is written at several levels:
- •The object label beside each work, typically under sixty words
- •A section panel introducing a room or a theme, at a few hundred words
- •An introductory panel for the whole exhibition
- •Extended labels for a small number of key objects
- •Guides, handsets and applications for those who want more
- •Catalogue entries at full scholarly length
What the arguments are about
Disputes about these texts are genuine disagreements about what a museum is for. Length is contested continuously, between those who hold that a visitor came to look rather than to read and those who hold that most people cannot make sense of an unfamiliar object unaided. Tone divides those who want authority from those who want a question that opens a conversation. Attribution wording carries enormous weight, since describing a work as by an artist, attributed to them, from their workshop or after them expresses quite different confidence and affects value. And acquisition history has become the most contested element of all, since stating plainly how an object reached the museum raises questions that a label giving only a donor's name does not.
What the words say about the object
The formulaic opening lines carry more information than they appear to. Dimensions are given in a fixed order and the convention differs between disciplines, which tells a reader something about how the institution classifies the work. Medium is stated with a precision that records what analysis has been done, so oil on canvas is an assertion that somebody checked. A date given with a question mark, with a range, or with a century, records exactly how confident the institution is. Credit lines record how the object was acquired and who paid, which is why donors insist on particular wording. And the accession number encodes the year of acquisition, which lets a reader date the museum's ownership at a glance.
How they are tested
Museums research these texts more systematically than visitors realise. Reading level is measured, with many institutions targeting a level well below the average adult so that the text is accessible to those with least confidence. Timing studies record how long people actually stand at a work, which is frequently under thirty seconds including the label, and that finding drives the length limits. Observation studies record whether people read at all and which labels are skipped. Trials compare wordings directly, showing different versions to different visitors and measuring recall and reported understanding. Type size, contrast and mounting height are set by accessibility standards. The result is that a label looks casual and is the product of considerable testing.
The takeaway
A label identifies an object, supplies context for an audience of unknown knowledge, and must be readable standing up in under a minute, while inevitably framing what the visitor thinks by choosing what to mention. Length, tone, attribution wording and acquisition history are all genuinely contested. Timing studies find people spend under thirty seconds at a work, which is why the texts are short and heavily tested.