In addition to all my epistemological doubts about text labels, I am now
cursed with trifocals, which has made the reading of labels, even ones of
formerly adequate size, an astonishingly painful experience.  At the Bare
Witness show at the Met last night, I had to get down on my hands and
knees to get through all the text on labels on floor panels (and the
writing, incidentally, was brilliant, though blessedly beyond the
capacity of any 5th-grader-- it was an exhibit on nudity in fashion
design).  And at the Brooklyn's splendid Converging Cultures exhibit,
much of the text is just simply inaccessible -- not to mention that a
show about Spanish interaction with native American cultures should have
had all its texts, and not merely an overall brochure, in Spanish as well
as English.  At some point in the evolution of this multilingual society,
with many of us war babies and boomers getting up there, the fantasy of
conventional text panels will come shattering down, and all those panels
and adivce manuals will be relegated to the museum of museums.  Let's
find better ways of communicating with our visitors.

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Richard Rabinowitz              <> American History Workshop
[log in to unmask]                  <> 588 Seventh Street
718/499-6500 fax: 718/499-6575  <> Brooklyn, New York 11215-3707