ABSTRACT
Museums are cultural institutions devoted to the pleasure and power of looking at things for ourselves. Barnum's brilliance was to understand how to combine entertainment, education, and the pleasures of "high" and "low" looking into a single offering. Barnum's museum may have intentionally blurred the line between the scholarly and the spectacular, but the idea of arranging and displaying a dazzlingly vast array of remarkable objects underlies many famous Western encyclopedic museums. The program at the National Gallery of Art takes what is often called a visual inquiry-based approach to learning in museums—an approach that has been on the rise in museums for a couple of decades. Many museums use an inquiry-based approach in their educational programming. The role of information in inquiry-based approaches is an oft-debated issue amongst museum professionals.
