Exhibition as Courtroom

Here’s a metaphor that’s helped me many times, working with clients:

Think of an exhibition as a courtroom.

We make persuasive spaces. The evidence we use establishes the credibility of our museum. Artifacts, specimens, media clips, and interactive demonstrative exercises — these are the equivalent of the weapons, camera footage, and crime scene reconstructions used in a trial. Our provenance text and science labels establish their authenticity.

Our curators, designers and researchers are lawyers. 

We don’t invent facts; we frame them. We select, omit, and sequence our evidence to construct our case and argue our theory.

Exhibition design is courtroom choreography.

We guide the jury — our visitors — without seeming to do so. Our layout, our pacing, what we light, what we don’t. Like jurors, our visitors arrive with prior beliefs and limited expertise. We can’t force them. We inform them. They judge for themselves.

The verdict we want? Credibility.

Here’s the thing:

Metaphorically, exhibitions are courtrooms. Artifacts are evidence. Exhibition teams are lawyers.

If we keep this framework in mind, it will guide our decisions to the benefit of our exhibitions and institutions.

If we don’t, we might lose our case.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day
Evidence. In an "exhibition as courtroom" metaphor, any object, experience or information deliberately presented to support a claim an exhibition makes to a visitor. Can include artifacts, original images or media clips, quotations, and interactive demonstrations.