“Unacknowledged in the new museology is a terrible fear of boredom–a fear that the object itself, unaided by programs and techniques and ideologies designed to explain and embellish it, will prove to be insufficient in interest.  Unacknowledged, too, is an assumption that the museum visitor brings to the object a lazy, slumbering mind that must be constantly shocked and stimulated and reawakened into paying attention.  There is, to say the least, too little faith that the art object is capable of generating its own kind of excitement–the only kind worth having in a museum–and too little understanding that aggressive interventions between the object and the perceiver act in the end to impair a genuine aesthetic response.”

–Hilton Kramer, “On the ‘Failure’ of Museums,” 1975