From some ongoing reading

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, "Information Overload: Research-Based Art"

The funny thing about going to an art museum is that it can involve a lot of text: there are informational placards, artists' notes, audio guides, and juxtapositions that need explaining. There are rules to follow about how much time you can spend in front of any particular work of art, the practical limitations of how much you can absorb from an image or an object without specialized training, and whatever your own personal gaps might be--all of it can easily turn into an experience where you spend more time on text than actually looking at the things you came to see. It's not the only reason I have continued to pursue my interest in art history, but it's nice to be able to read style, era, general location, iconography, motifs, and general story if historical or literary in the picture.

So the first essay here is about this, the increased tendency to explanatory text, and how it multiplied and increased as a certain dogmatic tendency in contemporary art exhibitions: by providing more the artist decenters themselves and provides information, context, and trusts the viewer to assemble the information in a meaningful way, even if that way is not the one or ones meaningful to the artist. Vast, liberatory, a way to think of the interconnectedness of the world and the contingency of what we see. 

Except now, not. If I walked into an exhibition filled with text and an exhortation to figure it out, I would simply walk through, or back out again. But people who feel a slightly higher level of obligation will sample or skim and come away with an incomplete picture of what was being done. A partial reason for this is that the information overload that opens up possibilities has been replaced for most of us with the information overload that we want to shut down.

This has some corporate resonances, in my work experience as an HR person tasked with making sure people can find information. The tendency to dump information into a wiki or intranet, often unorganized, and expect people to make their way through with no guidance. (Sometimes worse: continually restructuring the wiki to make it easier to find things, so that nothing is consistently in the same place from one year to the next). The tendency to turn an FAQ into a long list of every question that has ever been asked, usually unorganized. (Or half-organized and then with additional questions just added in at the end). Or sitting back with expertise and refusing, for various reasons, to apply it: if you have done a few cycles of health insurance renewals, you probably have the ability to do the quick math necessary to recommend a plan--I know because I do it with friends and former colleagues who need to figure this out for their new jobs.

That's the primary suggestion of the chapter, to the extent it's interested in making recommendations: recognizing that the context of information overload has become negative, there needs to be more effort towards guiding through. This doesn't mean reverting to Only One True Meaning, but it does require more careful thought and practice.