Accessing art

In reading Carmen Papalia's essay on museum access, I was thinking a lot about the effectiveness of verbal discriptions of visual art and art spaces. Papalia mentioned that the way he experiences a museum and understands a piece of artwork depends heavily on the person he is with. In any situation, the things that stand out to a person as particularly interesting or important are not necessarily the same as the things that will stand out to the next person. Furthermore, a piece of art will likely evoke different thoughts, memories, or emotions for differnt people. This may make it difficult for a person describing a piece to be completely non-biased in their description without staying true to the way that the art makes them feel or think about. Finding this balance is itself an art and requires careful selection of word choice and attention to the minor details and the way these details come together. This process of translating visual art into a verbal description also makes me think about the way ASL poetry is translated into written or spoken poetry. It is difficult to maintain the visual nature of the art form and in Deaf Jam, Aneta and Tahani had to work together for a long time to be able to get their poems to align and make sense together. Even then, their poems were not completely identical because some of their ideas were better expressed in one form than the other.