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]