A Sentence Spoken Before the Looking

In 1997 I was sixteen and in Hamburg, and the word reached me before any picture did. It was Sensation, the title of the show of Charles Saatchi's collection of young British artists that opened at the Royal Academy in London that September. I knew it from newspaper headlines and from the schoolyard, where it was already an adjective. I could not have named a single work in it. I knew only that I was supposed to be shocked.

I have thought about that word for almost thirty years, because it did something titles are not supposed to do. It reviewed the show in advance. Whoever walked into the galleries had been told how to feel, and the feeling had a price printed on it. When the exhibition crossed the Atlantic to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, the mayor of New York threatened the museum's funding over Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, a Madonna with elephant dung as one of her materials. Whatever one thinks of that picture, notice what the argument was about. It was about the offence the title had promised, and about a painting nobody in the debate had been asked to look at for longer than it takes to be outraged.

Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley, built from children's handprints, was pelted with ink and eggs in London in the first days. Marc Quinn's head cast in his own frozen blood sat in a vitrine a few rooms away, and Damien Hirst's shark hung in its tank. These are very different objects. Some of them are, I think, serious and some are merely loud, and the difference between those two is exactly what a title like Sensation makes invisible. When the umbrella word is volume, everything under it is heard at the same pitch. A title can do that to a show: it can decide the register in which everything inside will be received.

I want to argue something stronger than "titles influence viewers." They obviously do, and anyone who has stood in front of a wall of labels knows it. My argument is that a title is a sentence spoken before the looking begins, and that its worst fault is not being wrong. Its worst fault is to be so easily right that the viewer is spared the work of deciding. The titles that serve a show are the ones the show can disobey.

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I spent my twenties writing the other kind of sentence. In the education department of a museum, and then at a media-art centre, I wrote labels, and the lesson of that job was humbling. A label has about sixty words to be useful, and the first ten decide whether the visitor reads the other fifty. A title is the label of the whole show, with eight words or fewer and no second chance. At the media-art centre we once renamed an exhibition three days before it opened. The first title promised the future, and half the machines in the room had been dead for years. The new title was plainer and it was truer: it named what the room contained and left the verdict to the visitor. The room did not change. The attention people brought to it, I believe, did, though that last claim is a hunch and I cannot prove it.

My mother taught primary school for thirty-five years, and she had a rule in our house: Erst sagen, was da ist. First say what is there. She meant it as a discipline for children who wanted to announce "boring" or "beautiful" before they had looked. I have come to think it is the only useful test of an exhibition title. Does it say what is there, or does it say what to think of what is there? The two can sound alike, and they work in opposite directions.

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Consider the cleanest example of the second kind, and the most terrible. In July 1937 the Nazi government opened Entartete Kunst, "Degenerate Art," in the arcades of the Hofgarten in Munich, a short walk from the official Great German Art Exhibition that opened the day before. The title is a verdict in two words. It does not ask the viewer to look; it tells the viewer what to see in advance, and the hanging backed it up. Pictures were crowded together, tilted and surrounded by painted slogans of mockery on the walls. The whole apparatus was built so that a visitor never had to form an opinion of a Kirchner or a Nolde, because the title had done it for them.

By most accounts more people queued for the degenerate pictures than for the approved ones. I make no claim about why, or about what any one of them felt; that is the thing a critic does not get to know. But I note that a title built to close a work down could not entirely do it, because the works were in the room, and the room is the one place a title cannot follow. This is the quiet hope behind my whole argument. A title is only a sentence. A painting is a thing that goes on happening after the sentence ends.

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The opposite error is less dangerous and in some ways harder to see, because it comes with a smile. In 1955 the Museum of Modern Art opened The Family of Man, assembled by Edward Steichen: 503 photographs from sixty-eight countries, births, weddings, meals, funerals, children, workers, all arranged into one long sentence about sameness. I like many of the photographs. I do not like the title, and I think Roland Barthes was right to mistrust it in Mythologies. A title like that is a kindness so large that no one can object to it, and a title nobody can object to has stopped doing a title's work. It cannot be wrong, so it cannot be tested. Under it, a photograph of a Guatemalan harvest and a photograph of a Chicago kitchen become one thing, because the title said they were.

This is the point where I would disagree with a good many curators, who prize the title that welcomes everyone. I think a welcome that wide is a form of blindness. It asks the viewer to see likeness before difference, and difference is where the looking is. I would rather walk into a show whose title has a position I can resent than one whose title has a mood I must share.

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Titles can also be wrong in a way that turns out to be the right way. In April 1874 the critic Louis Leroy, writing in Le Charivari, took the title of one small harbour scene by Claude Monet and made a joke of it. The painting was Impression, Sunrise, shown in the first group exhibition of the painters who would later be called by his joke, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. Monet is reported to have said that the catalogue needed a title, that the picture could hardly be called a view of Le Havre, and that someone should put "Impression."

I love the shrug in that. And I love what the word does, which is to make a claim about time. An impression is what you get in a moment. By choosing that word, Monet told the viewer how fast to look and how little to expect to be told, and Leroy's mockery proved the instruction worked, because he spent his review complaining that the picture was unfinished. The title narrowed the attention, to be sure. It narrowed it onto light on water and away from the harbour's cranes and merchants. But it narrowed it toward the thing the painter wanted seen, and the painter chose the narrowing. That, it seems to me, is the line. A title that narrows what the maker wished you to see is an instruction. One that narrows what the institution wished you to conclude is a verdict.

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There is a harder case, and I would like to give it its due, because I admire the show. In 2018 the Guggenheim in New York presented Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. The Swedish painter had left instructions that her abstract work should not be shown until long after her death, which is how a body of pictures made from 1906 onward became known to the world only in recent decades. The title takes her at her word, and for most visitors that is probably a gift. It explains why they are looking at abstraction that predates the names usually attached to its invention, and it sets the pictures in a story about time that is easy to hold.

But my own view of the new makes me uneasy. "New" is not a property of a work; it is a relationship between a work and its moment, and the relationship changes. A title that says for the future quietly says that the work was early, and the claim of earliness is the oldest flattery in the history of art. It fixes her as a prophet before the visitor has stood in front of a single canvas, and a prophet is the one role in which a painter's pictures stop being looked at and start being believed. The paintings themselves are stranger and more particular than the word allows: the hard blues and yellows, the curling forms, the sheer size of them. I would have called the show something that gave the pictures first place, and left the prophecy to the viewer. This is my reading, not a finding about how anyone responded. I mention it because the title I would object to is not a bad title. It is a very good one, and that is the problem. It is so persuasive that it stops being an argument.

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On Sundays I walk to the flea market by the canal and buy catalogues of shows nobody remembers. I have more than I can shelve. What I notice, leafing through them, is that the titles have aged worse than the pictures. The pictures survive as pictures, good or poor. The titles survive as fashions, as the vocabulary of a particular year: a certain confidence about progress, a certain word for the people, a certain embarrassment about the body. A title reads, thirty years later, like a photograph of a mind, and rarely a flattering one. Perhaps that is its real function. A title is the place where an institution tells you, without knowing it, what it cannot see.

So my advice to anyone who names a show is not to be modest. A modest title is often a cowardly one. The advice is to name what is in the room and to let the name be a little less than the room. It should leave a gap the visitor can fall into, a mismatch between sentence and thing, because the mismatch is where looking begins. Sensation left no gap: the word covered everything and so it explained nothing. Entartete Kunst filled the gap with contempt. The Family of Man filled it with warmth. Monet left it open on purpose and a hostile critic unwittingly widened it.

My mother still telephones on Sundays. She never asks what the show was called. She asks what I saw this week, and then she waits, because she knows that whatever I say first is the title I have already given it, and she wants to hear the one I would give it if nobody were listening.

I wonder what that would look like on a wall: the title a viewer writes for themselves at the exit, set beside the title the museum wrote at the entrance. I suspect the distance between those two sentences would tell us more than any review, and more, perhaps, than the show.