Aren't signs supposed to be useful?

I went to the National Portrait Gallery with my mom this afternoon, checking out a special Josephine Baker exhibit.  We were out enjoying the freakishly warm weather (high of 72 degrees).  The National Portrait Gallery reopened during the summer after years of renovation and blocking a formerly convenient street.  It's a beautiful building, but there are some tricky aspects of it.

One such aspect is that it's difficult to navigate it.  Someone in charge realized this, so they set up signs periodically telling us where things are located.  For example, "Floor 3: Interpretive Dung Portraits of Disenfranchised, Indigenous Peoples."  The museum is set up as a circle, so any direction you walk, you'll end up where you started if you walk for long enough.  Unfortunately, the circle route is not an option, but compulsory.  There are no cross-hallways from exhibit to exhibit, and getting to one exhibit often means passing through another.

The signs point us in the right direction once we reach the floor of interest.  But not the signs next to elevators and stairwells.  So here's the basic scenario: you reach the new floor, knowing only that it has four exhibits, one of which is the one you want, "Ear Portraits in Various Mediums."  It is listed on the sign next to the stairwell, but there are no arrows.  So you have to take your chances and pick a direction.  Once you're firmly on the wrong path and wandering through the "Paintings of the Dead, White and Moneyed," another sign appears.  The ear exhibit was in the opposite direction, the arrows say.  Entrenched in the exhibit, you are unsure of what to do.  Do you go back, or would it be faster to just finish walking through the exhibit? After all, there's still a chance that the ear exhibit is behind another exhibit, and therefore farther away.

So here's the key question: why in the world would they put the signs with direction arrows only in places where they're too late to be of use?

Okay, so I posted on Sunday, and I misled you all by saying to check on Saturday.  Apologies...my wireless internet was on the fritz.

technorati tags:museums, portraits, signs, directions, family