What’s in a Label? Revising Narratives of the Decorative Arts in Museum Displays

Abstract

For this feature, curators working with museum collections that represented the British Atlantic were asked to revisit and revise a label on a decorative arts object that they had previously written. The aim was to show the hidden mechanics involved in condensing a complex story around an object’s history into a short text dictated by the physical size of the label. When that small and unassuming piece of paper sitting next to an object carries much of the interpretative weight in a museum, there are many factors involved in label-writing. Do you write from the neutral position of the institution? Or do you speak from lived experience? The responses gathered here adopt multiple formats. Some are accompanied by commentary, while others appear simply with the changes tracked. There are many different ways of thinking about what—and what doesn’t—end up going onto a label. Revealed too are the variety of different visitors that each curator imagines addressing as the reader of their text.