Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance

Abstract

There are an estimated 17,500 museums in the United States. If people think these institutions are pretty much the same once you get inside or that the differences between them are unimportant, it might be hard to persuade them that all 17,500 are needed. Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none. How can this be? “Museum-adept” visitors seem to prize museums as theaters in which their own emotional and spiritual journeys can be staged, but what about the non-museum-adept? Can the museum-adept teach us how to realize our medium’s full potential?