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]