ABSTRACT
Drawing on the author’s successful curation of an exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo, the chapter aims to help advance future visitor experiences in museums by exploring and re-theorising notions of time. Departing from ideas of linear time as constitutive of visitor experiences at the museum, the chapter considers three kinds of shock effect in the exhibition: Mixing up chronology, mixing artists and even media, and slowing down visitors through display: Height of hanging, wall texts and captions, and most crucially, seating. The chapter documents how museums may experiment with ways of combining artworks in the museum that offer different viewer experiences from what is found in mainstream art museums. The key argument, underpinning the theory-based empirical analysis, is that looking at art requires time; and that in current museum practice, this factor is entirely neglected. This undermines what art and be and do for the people in whose name, with whose tax money, and for whose benefit museums work.
