In the recent issue of The New Republic, the art critic Jed Perl accuses the current director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Campbell, of dumbing-down the museum by incorporating, among other things, the widespread use of iPads in the museum’s galleries (“Campbell Meets Warhol: Does the Met’s director think the public is stupid?”).

Perl asserts that Campbell is surrendering his previous, high curatorial standards to the desire to “demystify the museum through digital means” at the expense of experience and scholarship, effectively turning the museum into a “well-oiled corporate machine […] that downgrade[s] the value of curators, not to mention the value of art.”

It is true that since the 1980s the focus of museums increasingly has been on education and interpretation, which among other things, has created a boom for audio guides and now mobile apps. But the issue of experience vs. interpretation is at least as old a question as modern art itself, going as far back as the nineteenth-century French intellectual dispute on the museum between the poet Paul Valéry and the novelist Marcel Proust.
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