Enter the museum bench, a near
ubiquitous but frequently disparaged piece of furniture as routinely
overlooked as it is regularly used. In discussions of museum and
gallery, the hard bench or upholstered couch rarely makes an appearance.
Instead it hovers on the edge of museum studies, always there but never
acknowledged, its very presence an irritating distraction from the real
activity at hand: appreciating art. Even in cultural histories and
architectural manuals explicitly devoted to gallery interiors and their
spatial arrangement, the bench finds itself side-lined in favor of
frames, walls, colors, and lighting. In scholarship on the history or
design of public art exhibition spaces, the lowly bench receives barely a
nod.
Hidden in plain sight, museum benches
are stealth objects, just below the radar. So what might happen if we
acknowledge the elephant in the room? How might our understanding of
aesthetic spectatorship change if we take full account of the
utilitarian furniture found in most museums? 
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