ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some personal reflections and opinions of mine on the mechanics and politics of art interpretation. It does so in reference to my ongoing studies in interpretation practices as well as to my qualitative research into people's experiences of art museums and galleries. (I will use the term “museum” bluntly without regard to current technical definitions, to encompass publicly funded art display venues with and without collections.) In this sense, my understanding of “interpretation” enfolds both curators’ production, and visitors’ consumption, of knowledge. Alongside this we must also recognize the complexity of this dualism in the light of debates about agency and authorship, considering how interpretation can also be seen as a co-construction in which individual visitors are agents, responding unpredictably to curatorial interpretation and developing their own understandings of art, which may be quite different from those intended by curators (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 4). Arguably, interpretation is implicit in every aspect of museum operation, from marketing, security and baby-changing arrangements to acquisitions, collections management, the articulation of displays and the production of written texts and audio-visual material ( Ferguson, 1996). Each of these contributes to the stories of art “told” by the museum and/or to visitor experiences and understandings. In exploring this I will focus on three interrelated topics.
