I dream of a museum without curatorial comments.

This week I made my first trip to The Art Institute’s new Modern Wing with my mom and sisters. We had a lovely time there, and even got to eat in the new restaurant. I was quite pleased to see that the new Modern Wing, featured some much needed contemporary art, like Robert Gober, and Bruce Nauman, but I would have loved to see more (like the whole wing filled with contemporary art). The modern standards looked great as well, although much of the exhibit was the same work which was featured in galleries in the old building.

While wandering the galleries and looking at the work, I found those little curatorial tags to be particularly pesky. Not that they had changed at all: Artist Name, Nationality, Life Dates, Piece Dates, and a paragraph. That paragraph bothered me, like a person who keeps talking while you are trying to concentrate on a task. I found myself “feeling bad” if I didn’t read the paragraph, like I might be missing something, but then found the first two sentences to be so far from the experience of looking that I quit reading.

What would a museum be like without those paragraphs? What would it be like for the art to stand on its own? I dream of an exhibit where each work is free to stand on its own, free from the historical cannon, free from its family of work in another collection, free from the artist’s biography, free to be seen by an audience entrusted to have their own experience.