Engage your viewers' emotions with a title that provokes a personal reaction. British artist Tracey Emin's 1990s installation "My Bed," featuring an unmade bed, gave viewers an insight into the artist's tortured emotions, while encouraging them to question their own inner life. The title's intimacy made the confessional artwork more personal and provocative.
Introduce a title that gives people a better understanding of your work. If, for example, you are staging an exhibition depicting scenes from a war zone, briefly including factual or historical information in your title helps place the work in context and adds to its poignancy, particularly if paintings or photographs depict human suffering.
Strive to be concise, but evocative. Less is more when it comes to choosing a title, because it should leave a space in which someone viewing it can construct her own interpretations and question what the work is trying to convey. American artist Lynda Benglis, by choosing the title "Cocoon" for her 1971 phallic wax on wood sculpture, evokes questions about the tensions between safety and comfort and sexual potency. A brief title describing a portrait subject's occupation, for example, is also evocative and illuminating because it explains and leaves room for the imagination.