To the Editors:
I am writing to express my disappointment in Eric Gibson’s commentary, “Talk Shows at the Met,” in the November 1987 issue. Although I appreciate and share Mr. Gibson’s strong negative reaction to hype, I cannot accept his blanket rejection of museum education in general. His assertion that “the museum’s desire to inform its visitors needs to be balanced against the more compelling need to allow the work of art to speak for itself” is correct, but his subsequent comments reveal a general lack of understanding for the complexities of this task. Despite his self-righteous critique of the Met’s appeal to moneyed audiences—his assertion that the Portfolio tours are very expensive is actually based on incorrect information since the tours cost $20 for the set of four tours, including admission, and are therefore quite a bargain at $1 per tour—an old-fashioned elitist bias underlies his reasoning. I sense that at heart Mr. Gibson believes that works of art can and should talk for themselves and that he longs for that time when museums were the quiet, sparsely populated enclaves of the enlightened few who knew how to hold discourse with the silent masterpieces on display.

Those of us who work in the museum profession are often discouraged by the gargantuan task of educating the public and sometimes fall back ourselves on nostalgic reverie, but we have had to come to a very different set of conclusions. It helps to put the problem in a broader perspective. First,