‘For Your Eyes Only’: How Museum Walltexts Communicate East and West. The Case of the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation

Abstract

The artworks normally preserved in museums, both in permanent collections or in temporary exhibitions, can be accompanied by a particular type of scripts which specialists call extended labels or walltexts, i.e. brief descriptive and interpretative texts, meant to provide a context for the work of art, displayed for the visitors’ benefit. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the extent to which, if any, walltexts communicate different cultures to museum visitors, who are all tourists in a museum route. In particular, the aim of this contribution is to describe the way in which (1) the West is communicated to a Western audience and (2) the East is mediated to a Western audience. From the quantitative perspective the results of this study seem to indicate that there is a different way in which walltexts are elaborated when Western art and Asian art are presented to a Western audience: what is unknown to the Western audience has to be recreated in the short text of the extended label to allow the museum visitors to appreciate and understand the value of the artwork they are observing and at the same time to virtually touring Asian Art.

Keywords

• corpus linguistics
• keywords
• quantitative analysis
• semantic domain
• tourism discourse