by Andrew J. Pekarik

The ways that museums measure the success of their exhibitions reveal their attitudes and values. Are they striving to control visitors so that people will experience what the museum wants? Or are they working to support visitors, who seek to find their own path? The type of approach known as ‘‘outcome-based evaluation’’ weighs in on the side of control. These outcomes are sometimes codified and limited to some half-dozen or so ‘‘learning objectives’’ or ‘‘impact categories.’’ In essence, those who follow this approach are committed to creating exhibitions that will tell visitors what they must experience. Yet people come to museums to construct something new and personally meaningful (and perhaps unexpected or unpredictable) for themselves. They come for their own reasons, see the world through their own frameworks, and may resist (and even resent) attempts to shape their experience. How can museums design and evaluate exhibitions that seek to support visitors rather than control them? How can museum professionals cultivate ‘‘not knowing’’ as a motivation for improving what they do?

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• Andrew J. Pekarik (pekarika@si.edu) is Program Analyst in the Office of Policy and Analysis, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

by Ken Yellis

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?

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• Ken Yellis (Kenyellis@aol.com) is the Principal of First Light Museum Consultants, 378 Gibbs Avenue, Newport, RI 02840.

by David Carr

Fresh encounters with Maori treasures first seen by the author at the Metropolitan Museum in 1984 revealed the concentrated power of these objects and the importance of their presence among the beliefs and continuities of their makers’ culture. A masterwork viewed in a museum may evoke a strong and sometimes inarticulate response. We might say the inability to articulate reflects a larger dimension—an aspect of the infinite—residing in the object. Museum objects return us to the human culture and knowledge we carry with us; they stimulate reflective impulses essential to the shared threads of democracy. They allow us to locate ourselves and each other, and our shared horizons.

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• David Carr (carr@ils.unc.edu) is a member of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Photographs on these pages were taken in New Zealand by the author and are used with his permission.

by KEN YELLIS

Our relationships with our audiences have proved parlous. But if history is destined to be contested, where should museums be in that contest and how do we get there?

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum has turned out to be a path not taken; Enola Gay was a cautionary tale. But we should have these fights in museums, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged, because of how museums teach us, opening hidden windows on cloaked realities.

Museums can start by becoming clearer about what they think they are doing when they make an exhibition. Exhibitions can have a profound effect on visitors at many levels but it doesn’t happen very often. Is that because visitors seek another kind of experience from what we typically offer?