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. ...