[starship]

This isn't that complicated. From your original post: > If I go with a friend who understands the context, they can explain to me the history

Either your friend's explanation improved your experience at that museum/gallery, in which case I say "Put it on a plaque", or it didn't because our understanding of art can't be improved by any kind of brief explanation and really you need to "take an art history class" as you directed us to do. So which is it?

My conclusion is this: if including any kind of explanation --short, long, anything-- can improve the average person's experience at a museum or gallery, then they should do so. The fact that they don't makes a lot of people skeptical about the entire thing, which is a shame.

[wpietri]

A few minutes of dialog doesn't fit on any sort of plaque. It's interactive, personal, situational.

Also, I didn't say that a plaque-sized bite of text can't improve things. What I'm saying is that you won't necessarily get a work after reading one. Try it yourself. Take one of the IOCCC works and try writing a short paragraph that will explain it to the general-audience viewer.

And I didn't tell everybody to take an art history class. I told you to take one. Because then your arrogant, entitled-to-be-spoon-fed attitude might possibly be appropriate when you're actually paying somebody to educate you.

Modern art museums are not somehow legally obligated to make you happy. (Neither, for that matter, am I.) If you don't like the way museums are run, you have a problem. If you want to understand the art, you can go put in the time like everybody else did.

[Dylan16807]

Sure, I can do some IOCCC entries.

* This entry is an entire flight simulator/3d demo/fractal generator/graphical chess program in like a quarter of a page! Wow!

There, I've already covered most of the entries in a very easy explanation. Oh, and a lot of them put the source code into a cutesy shape or substitute out normal "C" words to confuse the reader. It's easy to point out features like that too.

* The C language lets you list word replacements to apply to your program before turning it into machine code. For example you can turn every "NEXT" into "start_printer(); feed_page(); shutdown_printer();". It's a great timesaver. You can also use it to say 'dump this entire file here' and centralize code that's used a lot. This entry has hundreds of replacements and does that entire-file-inclusion over and over. It uses tricky methods with all this replacement to pre-calculate the answer to a math problem before it's even turned into machine code. So the actual machine code ends up doing zero computation before outputting the answer.

* This program was being cute. Normally it's tricky to write a program that prints its own source code, because it's like making a sentence that contains itself. But turns out that some compilers will turn a blank file into machine code that does nothing. And doing nothing means you get a blank file for output. They changed the rules after that.

The last example is like a good example about modern art. It makes a point and pokes fun at the rules but you can only make so many clever observations about any particular thing. Almost every winning IOCCC entry has a legitimate purpose. And you can explain the purpose. Even though explaining the joke will never be as funny as natively understanding it. In art, explaining the purpose (even if it's something simplistic like capturing a scene) can expose those pieces of 'art' that have nothing to them (like the ones made by people with too much superglue and a desire to be 'shocking').

Also upgrade complete lays bare its jokey demeanor in the first couple seconds of menu, before you even reach any references or old-school graphics. You may not fully 'appreciate' the game but you can certainly understand and enjoy it without being a gamer.

[wpietri]

Right. I agree that one can put text next to art explaining something about it, and you have demonstrated it well.

However, starship was upset that the plaques weren't sufficient to make him get the artwork as a novice. I think you'd agree that explaining each work fully is impractical; there's just too much context that's relevant.

[Dylan16807]

I got the impression that he was complaining about the exhibits that have no explanatory plaque at all, not even a paragraph.