In her 1992 book, “Museums & the Shaping of Knowledge,” Eilean Hooper-Greenhill speaks of the promise of the Museum as a place where “knowing can alter seeing.” I think those of us who work in interactive educational technologies (or with docents, for that matter), have seen this happen time and again. But if you love looking at art, you may also believe that seeing can alter knowing.

Knowing alters seeing when our teaching/framing of questions through which artworks can be viewed leads people out from complacency or befuddlement (both of which breed impatience and alienation) to engagement. Most good educational multimedia provides a context that helps open up a mental framework for an art experience.

Seeing alters knowing: Conversely, when artwork encounters are compelling, they can alter how we know things, and what it is we think we know. Often these experiences are holistic, visceral, and act on many levels at once—perceptual, emotive, cognitive, and philosophical. They also, almost invariably, happen in person. Matters of scale, texture, and direct physical apprehension are key.

So museums can be seen as engaging our visitors on a journey of inquiry, where the rules and criteria often shift object by object, and you have to be supple enough to get under the “criterion limbo bar” (JT LeRoy) of someone else’s making. To hear JT LeRoy’s entire commentary on how s/he “found a way in” to the works on site at SFMOMA, and got past her prejudice against modern art as an instrument of castigation for those who “just don’t get it,” tune into the February SFMOMA Artcast at http://www.sfmoma.org/education/edu_podcasts_archive.html.