Who Decides What Makes a Museum Label Good?

“Most people visiting a museum really want to learn something, so they walk through the exhibits and read all these labels and try to digest as much as they can, but if the label is too long or confusing, they get frustrated and, of course, they are standing on their feet the whole time, which leads them to get museum fatigue.” This assertion by Katherine Whitney, a professional museum exhibition label writer in San Francisco, is sixty-one words long, just a bit longer than her ideal museum label, and probably wouldn’t pass her own test for good label writing. Still, her statement reflects a challenge that all art museums face when preparing the placards that ostensibly exist to help visitors who may have no prior knowledge of what they are looking at make sense of artworks in under a minute.

According to Whitney, they should not only identify what the visitor is looking at but also use as few words as possible—just enough to convey the point. Of course, the obvious next question is just how much information is necessary to do that. And on the other hand, how much is too much? In the case of a painting, a museum label should certainly include the title and date of the work, as well as the name and birth and death dates of the artist. Fun fact: placards that only list the title, dates and artist are referred to in the museum field as “dog tag” or “tombstone” labels. Should museum labels identify the subject matter of the painting? For instance, if a work is based on a story from the Bible, is the museum responsible for contextualizing the scene for visitors who aren’t caught up on their Bible stories? What if the painting was commissioned during the Counter-Reformation with the intent to push back on anti-Catholic Church sentiment? Should the biblical story be summarized on the label? How about what the Catholic Church hoped the painting would do to reinforce dogma?

That’s a lot to sum up in sixty words—good luck squeezing El Greco into two or three sentences. Some art museums, particularly European ones, don’t even bother and instead identify individual artworks with a number that visitors can use to find more information in a collection catalog that can be purchased at the admissions desk. In the United States, where museums try harder to make sure that visitors leave knowing something more than when they came, “didactic” labels represent the front-line effort to contextualize objects on display.

There are numerous other ways in which museums try to inform visitors about what they are seeing: gallery talks offered by exhibition curators or volunteer docents; exhibition catalogs, gallery brochures and large-print wall texts; and audioguides or downloadable apps that let visitors access information about individual pieces as they walk by them. All of these can convey more than museum placards, in which a mountain of information has to be condensed in a way that’s comprehensible to visitors with little to no knowledge but still engaging. That’s assuming people not only stop in front of a work but also take the time to read.

According to research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the “modal” length of time people spend in front of individual works of art is about ten seconds, which doesn’t seem like a lot until you consider they may spend less time actually looking at the artwork. Ours is a literate culture rather than a visual one, and “there is a comfort in reading a label,” Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, told Observer. “You are offered facts that are very relatable, whereas artworks themselves aren’t so easily contained. Labels are a left-brain experience, while art is experiential and not a test of knowledge. In my world, people wouldn’t need the damn label at all.”

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That isn’t to say that many people employed by or otherwise associated with museums, including members of curatorial, education, publications and engagement departments, as well as outside consultants, such as Whitney, and volunteers, don’t work diligently to make placards both more helpful to visitors and also less distracting. Labels at many institutions are written, revised, rewritten and revised again—usually by several different people. “A good curator is very close to the artworks he or she is responsible for,” according to Ellen E. Roberts, director of curatorial affairs at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. “But because of that close relationship, the curator may lose track of the audience. My colleagues and I are not the target audience for a label.”

At Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, labels originate with a curator, “written with the assistance of curatorial research associates,” and are then passed to the Department of Museum Interpretation for a review of “clarity of narrative and messaging, tone of voice, reading level and word count,” Mekala Krishnan, the museum’s associate director of museum interpretation, told Observer. But they’re not done yet. “There is usually some back and forth between the curatorial and interpretation departments before it then gets passed to our editor, who is the final gatekeeper for formatting, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as for overall clarity. From there, they go to design, and each of those three departments has additional rounds of reviews with design proofs.”

Some institutions keep working on their labels even after they are installed, with staffers watching visitors as they move through galleries, timing how long they stand in front of any object and watching their eyes to see if they are reading more than looking. Visitors may be questioned about what they saw: “What did you take away from this exhibition?” or “What do you know now that you didn’t know before?” This is quite labor-intensive and expensive, but it may be the only way to know for certain if the label did its job. Everyone in the museum field looks for a sweet spot, but there is no one “right” placard length, format or design. However, for several years, the Washington, D.C.-based American Alliance of Museums has offered awards to institutions that were deemed to have the best-written labels via the Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing Competition (which writers and editors from the aforementioned Taft Museum of Art have previously won). Their criteria for an exemplary label is as follows:

• A good label gets to the point and anticipates visitors’ burning questions about the object it accompanies.
• Eschewing superciliousness or obfuscation, a good label uses plain language and avoids cliché and specialist jargon
• Like a thoughtful host at a house party, a good label doesn’t assume prior knowledge. It sufficiently yet concisely introduces new people, artists and movements (i.e., “American painter Elaine de Kooning”).
• A good label doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it is the extension of a thoughtful interpretive plan and careful collaboration among colleagues.

Museum placards “get a bad rap,” according to John Russick, managing director of the Bronzeville Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and author of Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, though he does have some negative things to say about them. “You’ll often hear museum professionals make statements such as, ‘No one reads the labels in exhibitions.’ First off, I disagree. Secondly, this is as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as anything else. The truth is that most museums don’t give visitors a good reason to read their labels or to absorb their content.” Russick went on to say that the quality of the writing is generally poor. The size of the text is too small. The contrast between the color of the type and the color of the background is weak, and supplemental graphic choices like illustrations, photographs or maps do little to help visitors understand the art.

But length might be the biggest barrier to visitor engagement. Less is more, asserts Judy Rand, a Seattle, Washington museum consultant who offers workshops in label writing. “The shorter the label, the more people will read it.”

Others argue that less is just less. “A few extra words to help deliver meaningful content is less of an issue than a shorter label that doesn’t engage a visitor or invite them into the conversation,” said Krishnan, who added that the High Museum will go as high as ninety-five words. “Our end goal is to help visitors look more closely and empower them to find something of personal interest.”

Some people seek “historical context, while others want to understand the artist’s vision or are fascinated by technique.” Someone has to make the decision about what to highlight and, at the High, that team working on the labels makes it. “We cue visitors as to what is important.”

Museum placards for objects in an exhibition may be treated differently than those for pieces in permanent galleries, as works in thematic exhibits form part of an overall narrative, and each label can offer information that adds to what the previous one already relayed. A show of paintings by El Greco, for instance, might have labels that focus on the work he was creating in a certain place at a specific time. “Each label can fill in gaps, offering parts of the story,” Russick said. More difficult are artworks in the permanent collection that may have nothing in common with any other piece in a gallery beyond the year they were created. In this case, each artwork’s label might present more information, yet not so much as to overwhelm visitors. A difficult task that, ultimately, is never-ending.

A solution to these various quandaries might be found in audioguides, as listening while looking lets visitors focus on the visual components of the artworks. With audio, discussions of individual works can be longer, and visitors can actively choose whether to engage with additional information via QR codes or other prompts. Music relating somehow to the object on display can further enhance the guide. “Younger visitors are the prime audience since they live on their phones, but they’re not the only audience,” Lou Giansante, a New York City-based producer of audio tours for museums, told Observer.

Debates still rage over what a museum label should or shouldn’t be or do. Some believe placards should only offer the most basic dog tag information (artist name, work title and year); others believe they should describe the work fully or even delve into what museumgoers are not seeing, like the ways an artwork might reveal a time period’s racial discrimination, colonial conquest or some other form of marginalization. “What can be said is that the era of an indomitable curator insisting on erudite label copy with polysyllabic words is over,” asserted Maxwell L. Anderson, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and current president of Souls Grown Deep. “I suspect that over time it will be seen as quaint to use a label as anything more than an object identifier, leading to the next generation of QR codes, whatever that platform might be.” Anderson advocates for letting visitors chart their own course, seeking out more information or not.

There are lots of possibilities, but perhaps the option of little to no labeling that one finds in many European museums is worth reconsidering. “Every year, I take my students to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which doesn’t provide any labels for artworks on display,” James Pawelski, director of education at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, told Observer. “There is no intermediary between the viewer and the art, so students have to deal directly with the art.” He is not opposed to labels per se, but like many others, Pawleski has something to say about the many museum placards he sees. “You don’t want the label to take away the mystery of the artwork, what makes it interesting and inspiring. That’s why I prefer labels that help people become immersed in a work of art.”