Last year, at a panel discussion during the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums,[1] speakers debated the proper role of special effects—dramatic lighting, slides, video, and sound—in museum installations. Allon Schoener, a museum consultant and exhibition designer who is best known for mounting the “Harlem on My Mind” show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, spoke first.

“In ‘Harlem on My Mind,’ we made use of communications technology to interpret a cultural subject,” Schoener stated. “Every space in the exhibition area had a sound track . . . and we used all of the communication equipment to pulse people as they moved through the space.”

Schoener went on to say that interpretation, rather than presentation, is the task of museums today. Epcot, Disney’s high-tech amusement park in Florida, epitomizes the future for him. “In this age of increasingly sophisticated communications technology,” Schoener declared, “museums must be part of the contemporary world or they will vanish into oblivion.”

Michael Spock, vice-president for Public Programs at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, also spoke. Museums exist to show objects, he said, and part of the current popularity enjoyed by such institutions stems from the fact that the public sees “the real thing” in them instead of the reproductions it gets from television, films, and other mass media. But an object brought to a museum, he pointed out, has invariably been torn from its original context. A part of it dies