ABSTRACT
The history of gallery interpretation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, U.S., is characterized by both deep silence and rigid didacticism. Irrespective of such divergent approaches, interpretation has addressed a visitor who for the most part has been imagined, ideal, and hypothetical. Presentations of MoMA's permanent collection have been shaped by a belief in the possibility and power of the unmediated encounter between viewer and object. In 1934, Alfred Barr, Jr., MoMA's founding director, wrote: “Words about art may help to explain techniques, remove prejudices, clarify relationships, suggest sequences and attack habitual resentments through the back door of the intelligence. But the front door of understanding is through experience of the work of art itself” (Barr Jr., 1934). Writing on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art's fifth anniversary, Barr sets up a dichotomy between an intellectual understanding of art mediated by words, and a deeper, spiritual experience that comes from a direct encounter.
