Labels should be short and concise, more like a tweet than a tome. Labels should be written with a vocabulary that is within reach of the majority of visitors. Label design should reflect the label’s content or context and be part of a recognizable system of label types. Labels that ask questions should be visitors’ questions. Labels should know their audience and address visitors’ prior knowledge, interests and/or misconceptions.

Labels should emphasize interpretation (offering provocation) over instruction (presenting information). Labels should relate to the big idea of the exhibit, not ramble without focus or objectives, or contain sub-sub-subtopics. Labels should begin with concrete, visual references to the objects they interpret to bring them to life. Serrell covers everything from “making words and images work together” to “production and fabrication.” Serrell’s Ten Commandments” of labels are common sense guidelines that are very frequently ignored: The core text on the subject is by Beverly Serrell, Museum Labels, An Interpretive Approach (Second Edition, 2015). But current museum opinion is strongly in favor of labels, especially labels that contextualize a work of art and engage the viewer, often with questions that serve as pathways into a work. My first art museum mentor, Agnes Mongan, disliked all explanatory labels because she believed that they distracted from a deeper contemplation of the work of art, and viewers’ openness to their own discoveries and personal associations. Some contemporary artists, like Josiah Mcelheny, have effectively borrowed the authority of museum labels to tease out profound issues of the interaction of modernist templates and their presumed dependence on platonic ideals. What a pity that there is not more often humor in museum labels! The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is an outlier in doing a good job in this regard. “A maenad is greeted by two satyrs, who are obviously excited to see her.” “In the beginning, shortly after God created heaven and earth, man and woman, there were stones to throw and sticks to swing.”Ī second favorite was at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 1990s, in the Department of Classical Art, but long since taken down: it accompanied a 5th Century BCE Greek kylix krater, depicting two ithyphallic satyrs greeting a voluptuous maenad: Finally, the dictionary of synonyms helps writers to avoid repetition of words within the same piece of text, thereby improving their writing style.My favorite museum label of all is at the start of the historical text at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York: It also makes it possible to find terms that are better suited to describe a characteristic, purpose, or function of the thing, person, or action in question. The dictionary of synonyms enables users to find the most suitable terms for the context, rather than just those that first spring to mind. The word bicycle can be considered a synonym of bike.ĭispute and altercation are words that are synonyms.Īnxiety and unease are two synonyms that can be found in this online dictionary of synonyms.

That's why they can be found in dictionary descriptions. When you use synonyms, the meaning of your phrase does not change. Synonyms are different words that mean the same thing. The word synonym refers to a word that has the same meaning as another word, or a meaning that is very close to that of the other word.

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