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.

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.