Your Answers: What’s the Purpose of an Exhibition?

Last week, in the email What’s the Purpose of an Exhibition?, I asked:

What is the biggest, most important, highest purpose of every exhibition?

Here are some of your great replies.

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SPECIAL NOTE:
Let's meet at AAM 2024 this week! Are you heading to the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting 2024 in Baltimore, May 16-19? I'll be there and I'd love to connect with any MtM readers or listeners who'd like to meet IRL. Hit REPLY to this message and LMK!

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Your answers (very lightly edited for clarity):

To welcome people
- Reader B.C.

To delight the visitor
- M.H.

To engage the visitor
- J.T. 

To impress the visitor
- L.G.

To connect with visitors
- P.O.

To show you something you haven't seen before, or make you see something old in a new context
- K.A.

To give visitors an opportunity to have an engaging experience
- S.U.

To learn about a subject
- J.S.

To engage
- K.B.

To teach the audience something (could be school-like learning, or learning about a brand, etc)
- A.K.

Reader D.P. wrote in (appropriately, with those initials) with a cinematic take:

To frame the shot, queue the scene/actors, direct the light crew … tell a story from a vantage point, and leave it up to the audience to draw a conclusion; sometimes intentional, sometimes open-ended.

And one reader even wrote in with an answer that makes a great “here’s the thing”. Take it away, M.P.!

Here’s the thing:
It depends. The main goal of every exhibition is to teach others about the subject matter that you are focused on, if you are in Curatorial. [Or] to raise awareness of the museum, if you are in Marketing. [Or] to raise money (or at least be fiscally responsible), if you are in Operations or Accounting. Ideally, I think the main goal of every exhibition is to share collections with people, tell them the story, and educate them on a particular subject (I will side with Curatorial on this answer). In practice, it must be decided amongst leadership as to how the success of the exhibit is to be measured — which then defines the main goal of the exhibit.
- M.P.

Warmly,
Jonathan

P.S. That special note again:

SPECIAL NOTE:
Let's meet at AAM 2024 this week! Are you heading to the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting 2024 in Baltimore, May 16-19? I'll be there and I'd love to connect with any MtM readers or listeners who'd like to meet IRL. Hit REPLY to this message and LMK!