The notion is absurd. A label is a "stand-in," a temporary bridge over a
gulf in understanding or meaning.  The Most Perfect Exhibits need no
labels; they are apprehended, engaged, absorbed, and translated into
personal meaning and action without extrinsic text or maps or graphics.
My great examples are the Renaissance altarpieces in Italian churches.
Composed of architectural "frames," encompassing many distinct pictorial
elements, they are fronted by rows of benches and candle-holders.  The
altarpiece, of course, sits within another architectural composition --
the church itself, with its own architectural, musical, auditory, and
even olfactory environment.  The altarpiece is a kinesthetic experience,
as well as a multi-sensory one, but it never includes text.  "Visitors,"
that is, worshippers, know how to encounter and engage it with text of
their own.

Once the paintings have been severed from this context, ripped out of the
frames of experience for which they have been designed, and re-installed
in white-walled modern museum environments, they need the reconstitutive
energy of interpretive labels. Museum visitors, after all, come without
the intellectual structures, not to say the faith and sensory
apperceptiveness, of the worshippers.  They are frequently illiterate in the
tradition.  The label we supply is then a remedial device.

Of course, remediation is never neutral, and many bridges are more
interesting and impressive than the shorelines they connect.  Indeed, the
greatest works of art, the most interesting specimens of science and
history, are probably those which generate the most interesting
interpretive efforts.  (My ideas about bridges have led to thoughts about
the Brooklyn Bridge, in particular.)  But we have to be careful to assume
that any thing we design is perfect, is an end in itself.  Looking for
the preparatory formula usually means closing our eyes to the subsequent
experience of our visitors.  A bridge has to connect something.  Pay more
attention to the roads people take to get to the object, and where
they're going afterwards.

Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop, [log in to unmask]