First, let's agree that art, historical, or scientific objects and specimens are
 not self-explanatory, and often need something called interpretation to make th
em comprehensible and enjoyable to us.  Such interpretation is a good thing.  I
could hardly th
ink otherwise, having given 28 years of my life to the creation of interpretive
programs in museums and historic sites in 30 states, Canada, Israel, and Mexico!
I used the altarpiece as a heuristic model.  Of course, I did not mean to say th
at a church is a museum, although both may contain works of art.  (Incidentally,
 there's an elegant little discourse comparing churches and museums in the title
 story of John
Updike's Museums and Women.)   But museum educators and interprets can often lea
rn much by comparing a variety of settings in which art or historical concepts a
re presented.  Like many professionals, we are often unaware of the organizing a
ssumptions of o
ur own work.  We encounter art in museums, but also in houses of worship, in our
 homes, in civic buildings, in retail establishments, even (according to many on
 Museum-L) on the WWW.  Each of these settings is itself an interpretive framewo
rk, often provi
ding powerful cues (sensory, intellectual, kinesthetic, etc.).  So museumization
, the movement (I refrain from using any more vivid language) of objects from on
e environment to another, is itself an interpretive act.
(It's also true that the object need not be moved at all to be "museumized."  An
 example is our work on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum's tenement at 97 Orc
hard Street in New York, which was transformed from a run-down slum dwelling, ab
andoned for alm
ost six decades, into a place where the lives and material culture of generation
s of urban working-class immigrants could be explored.  One day it was derelict,
 the next it was a shrine.  Amazing!)
Let me get back to the diversity of settings.  We need to know about the cogniti
ve and affective impact of spaces other than the museum, like the church, becaus
e our visitors come to us with lots of familiarity with these other "frames," ev
en if they have
 never been in a museum.  It is a sign of respect to them to assume that they ca
rry these kinds of "literacy" with them.  So when Ms. Glazer provides interpreta
tion as "a starting place for those who initially find the work puzzling," it is
 perhaps worth
considering who is finding what to be puzzling.  Maybe visitors don't know where
 to start, but maybe we too are "puzzled" about what such people are supposed to
 be doing in the gallery.
Consider another frame.  When we invite people into our homes, most of us courte
ously "interpret" many of our own objects with considerable warmth and wit.  We
tell amusing stories about how we acquired this or that, or what we imagined it
was when it was
 first encountered.  We use these objects to tell about our families, our histor
ies, our innocences and experiences.  We are excellent interpreters.  We know th
at if our visitors are familiar with these objects, we speak to them in one way;
 if not, we qui
ckly find an alternative language that is more appropriate.  If our visitors wil
l stay for a moment, we courteously offer them refreshments.  Like Moliere's "bo
urgeois gentilhomme," who was surprised to learn that he had been speaking "pros
e" all his life
, most of us have many years of interpreting without knowing it.
So why does this suddenly become such a problem when we drive to work, park, unl
ock our office doors, and become interpreters in the museum setting?  Are the pe
ople who come to the museum less able to understand objects than the guests in o
ur home?  Or, m
ore likely, is it that the museum often interposes hurdles (note to the ADA poli
ce:  only figurative ones) to this apprehension?
Try writing a perfect label for the objects in your house, and you see why I thi
nk the notion is absurd.  When your children's friends come over, will they be a
ble to make sense of the object through the interpretive label you've provided?
 If you live or
 work on the East, West, or Gulf coasts of the nation, it's likely that an incre
asingly large number of your visitors are not comfortable reading English.  What
 will you do?  How do wall labels work for those of us whose eyeglasses are supp
osed to help us
 read, but only when 18-point text is held about eight inches away from our ches
ts?
We've been trying in some recent projects to design ways to provide multiple and
 diverse interpretive devices (and without using computer-interactive devices),
but I'll leave that for another posting.
For now, let me suggest that there are all kinds of easy ways for labels and oth
er interpretive material to open themselves up to the visitors' prior knowledge.
  (The more we capitalize on that knowledge, the smarter visitors will feel, and
 the smarter vi
sitors feel the more they will experience and learn.)  A current example from th
e Met's Goya exhibit will serve.  In introducing the artist's series of engravin
gs on bullfighting, the label copy says that Goya created a "cinematic" history
of the sport, a
nd then goes on to play on the parallel of bullfighting in the Spanish context w
ith American baseball.  These powerful metaphors and analogies provoked (at leas
t in me) a flood of detailed explorations of the artwork, and of my own ideas ab
out the movies
and about baseball.  For the five or ten minutes it took me to navigate the gall
ery, I felt enormously competent -- and I can now remember the engravings quite
vividly.  By contrast, the Met's show on Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt makes almost no
 effort to reac
h out to experiences and skills that visitors already have, and despite the powe
r of the art frequently exhausts its visitors.
So the question is not whether contemporary or modern art speaks for itself, but
 rather who speaks for the visitor?  In a culture ceaselessly devaluing knowledg
e in favor of access to information, museums are too often counterproductive (an
d self-destruct
ive) educational institutions.
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]