To guide or not to guide?

Building on my last post, one way that people regularly perform in museums and galleries is, of course, as guides, room warders, or historic re-enactors. This is a role that divides opinion among visitors. There are two types that you’ll encounter in most museums: either the audio guide, or the tour guide / well-informed room guard. The former is increasingly prevalent in national museums, the latter in house museums. Both aim, in general, to add to the visitor experience.

I, in general, find both infuriating. Audio-guides inevitably focus the visitor on a selection of key exhibits. Visitors learn information about these which could not be included on a label for reasons of space, time or media. Yet, this not only means that visitors are mostly blind to the rest of the museum, but that they congregate around these key exhibits to the detriment of other visitors. Audio guides seem to make visitors oblivious of their wider surroundings, meaning that they both miss the more general museum experience of ‘following your nose’, and that they impact on the experience of others by heedlessly walking in front of or into them.

Tour guides / room warders are a different danger. They are there to answer visitor’s questions or to make a house that is sparse in interpretation more accessible. Yet, I generally find that such guides have been insufficiently informed on their surroundings and are unable to tailor their information to the groups that they encounter. Being dragged away from something that interests you to hear a garrulous and ill-informed anecdote is surely not the point of such collections. The wonder of house museums is in allowing the visitor to experience the full surroundings of objects and atmosphere. This requires time, space and independent exploration.

All of this said, there is undoubtedly a use for such guiding, which can add to the visitor’s experience with more than information. The audio guides in Tate Modern’s Rothko show in 2008-2009 included a section of music to accompany visitor’s contemplation of the central room. Likewise, I have been on specialist tours of house museums – notably the National Trust’s 2 Willow Road, and the Wallace Collection – led by well-informed and engaging guides that left me fired with enthusiasm. With new digital media guides, visitors can be shown related images and objects which could not be included in the show. Of course this again raises the problem of focusing visitors on the guide rather than their surroundings.

The problem arises when such guides give information which should be available for all visitors, or detract from both the individual and general experience. Guides require thoughtful and creative training (or construction) to make them an asset to the visitor. I worry that cuts to museum education budgets will only make this less of a priority.