The rise of live storytelling in recent years is remarkable, both for its bottom-up, scrappy scene (headquartered in Brooklyn, of course) and its rehabilitation of a historical form of entertainment and conviviality. A few storytelling events are held at museums, but that’s not the same as museums telling stories in their own exhibitions or programs. A new hiking memoir, of all things, just reminded me what the recipe has always been.

Having been laid up sick for a few days with the book, Wild, for company, I can tell you that its author, Cheryl Strayed, deserves the praise that critics have been showering on her. The book, which is about how she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone in order to put her reckless, splintered life back together, is heartfelt, honest, gripping, funny and, for me at least, deeply moving.

Those are critical clichés, I know. But there’s one kind of cultural narrative they’re almost never used to describe: museum exhibitions. Museum people often speak of exhibitions as “telling the story” of so-and-so, or collections as “telling the stories” of a particular time and place. But compared to the real storytelling that’s going on these days, from The Moth (pictured) to This American Life to books like Strayed’s, museums’ use of the word “story” feels like a mere metaphor, an approximation.

You’ve seen plenty of exhibitions with a historical shape, and a beginning, middle, and an end. But when’s the last time you came out of an exhibition feeling like somebody had told you a story? 

When’s the last time you’d have described an exhibition — or a symphony concert or dance program, for that matter — as heartfelt, gripping, honest, or moving? The individual artworks, historical artifacts, or performances, sure. But the exhibition — the evening — the program created by the cultural institution itself?

Strayed’s book got me thinking about the difference between a narrative (that slightly precious, academic word) and a story. Her book, like all good stories, moves in two directions, which we might call horizontal and vertical (see diagram, below). The horizontal direction is the unfolding of the plot: where the story is taking us, and how we’re going to get from here to there. It’s the dimension of surprises, twists, and the pleasure of wondering (or fearing or wishing) what’s going to happen next. When we say something is gripping or suspenseful, we’re praising the horizontal dimension.

Exhibitions, for all their traditional emphasis on chronological and other kinds of narratives, aren’t particularly good at this. As I’ve asked here before, when do museum visitors ever feel suspense about what the next gallery will tell them, or how it’s going to end? ...

For our parting post of 2010, I’m delighted to have Jaime Kopke as our guest blogger. Jaime founded the Denver Community Museum, a one-year pop-up experiment in community curation. She then spent a year in London earning a Master’s in curating contemporary design. Which gave her keen eyes for the new installation at Princess Di’s house...

Browsing through the comment book at the “Enchanted Palace,” an exhibit currently on show at Kensington Palace, I noticed two main sentiments: love and extreme dislike. I was in the former category, an enthusiastic fan.

“Enchanted Palace” is the Historic Royal Palaces’ answer to the challenges of a £12 million building renovation, one which has forced the closure of a large portion of the site. The exhibition will run through early 2012, when the rebuilding is complete.

Kensington Palace was the home to many of Britain’s famous princesses, including Queen Victoria and Diana, Princess of Wales. This exhibition tells the tales of seven of these royal inhabitants. Under the direction of the Cornwall-based theater company Wildworks, the building has been transformed into a magical, eerie, thoroughly fascinating space. Instead of following a linear timeline of the princesses’ lives, visitors encounter dramatic installations inspired by their stories. In each of the princesses’ rooms, historic artifacts are intertwined with contemporary artwork, handmade props, dramatic lighting and strange soundscapes. Drifting among the crowds are Wildworks’ storytellers, actors dressed in industrial-type gowns who engage — and sometimes bewilder — the audience.

Upon entering, visitors are given a hand-drawn map for the quest at hand: to discover the history behind each of the seven princesses. There are no labels on the walls to provide the answers. Instead, visitors are asked to explore one princess’s story at a time, to become enthralled, enamored, and in more cases than not, saddened by her touching tale. To help make the magic happen, the curators and Wildworks tapped into the talents of UK fashion designers, including Vivienne Westwood, Stephen Jones, William Tempest, Boudicca, and Aminaka Wilmont, and illustrator and set designer Echo Morgan. In the Room of Royal Sorrows, for example, a dress of tears created by Aminaka Wilmont is draped over the bed, marking the place where Mary II was unable to produce an heir. In a dark room nearby, a dress made of origami cranes hovers above an oversized bed, revealing Victoria’s childhood dreams of fleeing the palace.

It is this collaboration with contemporary designers and artists that helps make the show so successful. By creating a bridge to the present day, “Enchanted Palace” does more than liven up some dreary spaces; it evokes emotion and wonder. Museums partnering with artists is not a new concept, as Peter pointed out here recently. Increasingly, curators are giving over their spaces, programs and collections to artists for creative interventions. The result is usually an exciting new interpretation. ...

What’s the history-museum equivalent of a real page-turner? Museum professionals talk about the power of storytelling, but often exhibit stories are so broad they feel like summaries — book-jacket blurbs rather than the book itself.

Last weekend I posted about visiting the New Mexico History Museum, whose main permanent exhibit, “Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now,” opened last year but already feels dated, at least to me. Yet it represents typical contemporary practice in history museums — heck, even “best practices” in many ways. So the questions I’m raising are less criticisms of this installation and more a lob in the ongoing volley about how museums think about the “rules” and strategies of engagement.

In the same spirit, here’s an observation about the sheer breadth of the narratives that exhibits like these tend to tackle. That title, “Telling New Mexico,” says it all: this is 500 years of stories in six subdivided galleries, starting “Beyond History’s Records” and eventually arriving at “Becoming the Southwest” and “My New Mexico.”

Such breadth, coupled with the necessary brevity of panel texts and object labels, results in a level of generality that might seem comical if we weren’t so used to it. Here’s the only mention I saw of Kit Carson, that conflicted nemesis of the Navajos whose military genius led to the infamous “Long Walk,” in which hundreds of Navajo men, women, and children died:

In 1826, a restless 16-year-old Kit Carson arrived in Taos, New Mexico. Three years later, he was on his first trapping expedition. One of the most famous men of the West, he led a complex, adventurous life as a hunter, scout, soldier, rancher, and Indian fighter.

Texts like these are unsatisfying on almost every level. They raise more questions than they answer (Why was he famous? Was it somehow unusual for a newcomer to go on a trapping expedition at the age of 19? What was complex about his life?).

But the chief question they raise is, “Why should we care?” The panel feels dutiful, as if the curators were checking off an item on their list. It neither conveys their interest in the subject nor sparks our own. ...