Hank Burchard's conception of museums as "showbiz" troubles me. If he means keeping audiences engaged and interested, then good. But there's a darker side to showbiz, the one that distorts history to keep people engaged and interested (Oliver Stone's movies about presidents, TV disasters based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, most of Disney's products). Do we want our museums to cater to the lowest common denominator to get people in the door and to keep from challenging comfortable ideas? I don't. Showbiz exists primarily to sell products: is this what we want museums to do? I say no. Museums should take a more serious tack in illuminating culture than showbiz normally does. It would be great if a history museum t-shirt was as cool as a power rangers lunchbox, but not if the price of such popularity is the loss of historical integrity in favor of market share. However, both Burchard and Nicholson make good points. Communication and intelligibility are paramount if any learning is to take place. Might it be possible to be provocative, scholarly, honest, engaging, and interesting AND to communicate themes effectively to a general audience at the same time? Striving for this ideal, of course, assumes that the primary goal of a museum exhibit is to educate. I suppose curators could learn a good deal from commercial TV, movies, advertising, and theme parks in terms of mass communication -- but as far as content goes, those modes seem, for the most part, to be antithetical to historical interpretation based in fact, rather than in sales gimmicks. People will go to see what they want to see, of course. Museums should help make people want to see good exhibits -- not emulate showbiz so that people will "buy" the product. As they say on public TV, "If we don't, who will?" ........................ Doug Lantry University of Delaware [log in to unmask]