…that babe, of course, being Colin Firth.

Am I right, or am I right?

From his appearance on Inside the Actors’ Studio:

Anyone who has tried to speak another language will find, if you’re limited in that language, will find that you end up saying what you can rather than what you really want to say. And you start to circumnavigate the real thing. So who then are you in relation to the real world?

It’s important to remember that you won’t just have visitors who feel insecure in the language(s) of your museum, but you’ll have visitors who feel insecure in the language of museums. You’re talking – are you sure your visitors understand what you’re saying?

What tools do you provide to help your visitors feel confident in “speaking museum?” Do you give suggestions on how to look? How to question? How to explore? How to problem solve? How to think critically? How to disagree? Do you create common vocabularies for everyone to share?

We work so hard to encourage discourse, discussion, and debate to happen in our spaces, for visitors to have engaging dialogues with us and each other. I wonder how much might get lost in translation?

What if, during a trip to your museum, visitors didn’t just see things but learned how to see them – practicing and perfecting their fluency in museums so they can say what they really want to say, and we can hear them?