Photograph by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Wired
for art: Visitors sharing an iPod listen to the audio tour, downloadable from the Museum of Modern Art's Web site, of the
exhibition "Without Boundary." Article Tools Sponsored By RANDY KENNEDY Published: May 19, 2006
In 1958 the National Gallery of Art in Washington embedded
transmitters under its floorboards and handed out radio receivers so the electronically inclined could listen to something
called LecTour, a recorded guide to the museum's masterpieces. But the signal sometimes sounded as if as was arriving from
Tibet, and unless you caught a lecture at the beginning, you had to wait for it to start over. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art's version, introduced in 1963, was more tractable but a lot heavier. Patrons rented a tape player about the size of a
loaf of bread, carried around with a leather shoulder strap.
Over the years the technology improved, and audio tours
became ubiquitous. But they are now being upended around the world by something eminently more portable, accessible and flexible:
podcasting, the wildly popular practice of posting recordings online, so they can be heard through a computer or downloaded
to tiny mobile devices like iPods and other MP3 players. In the spring of 2005, when a professor and a group of students at
Marymount Manhattan College made waves by creating their own, unauthorized MP3 audio tour for the Museum of Modern Art, few
art institutions were even exploring the idea of podcasting as an alternative to official audio tours, created by companies
like Acoustiguide and Antenna Audio.
But in the short time since then, museum podcasts —
both do-it-yourself versions and those created by museums themselves — have taken off, changing the look and feel of
audio tours at places ranging from the venerable, like the Met and the Victoria and Albert, to the virtually unknown, like
the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Ind., and the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia near San Francisco. ("As
far as we know," intones the museum's co-founder, Gary Doss, on his thoroughly homemade podcast, "this is the only place in
the world to see every Pez.")
The podcasts are making countless hours of recorded
information — like curators' comments, interviews with artists and scholars, and even interviews with the subjects of
some artwork — widely available to people who have never visited, and may never visit, the museums that are making the
recordings. If, for example, you do not manage to make it to the Met to see Kara Walker's show "After the Deluge," you can
still hear her talk about it while sitting on the subway or walking down the street.
Smaller museums like Mr. Doss's are also using the
medium as kind of low-budget radio station — findable through iTunes or Internet podcast directories — to publicize
themselves and tell their story in a direct, personal, sometimes quirky way. If, for example, you were not able to make it
to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Tex., to see its recent show "Sharp Horns, Soft Seats: The Art of Horned
Furniture," you can go to the museum's Web site, www.panhandleplains.org, and listen to the exhibition's podcast to get a
pretty good feel for the museum and for the frontier chic of bison-horn coat racks.
"There are a lot of places out there that are trying
to use this as a new way of communicating who they are, and you can communicate differently than you can online, on a static
page," said Robin Dowden, the director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which in addition
to podcasting also allows patrons to use their cellphones to listen to exhibition information (as does the Brooklyn Museum
for its William Wegman show now on view; patrons dial a number that is provided at the exhibition and then use the phone's
keypad to navigate the tour).
At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which began
producing podcasts last September, the idea almost from the beginning, said Peter Samis, the museum's associate curator of
interpretation, was not just to create a new kind of audio tour but also to free the audio tour from the confines of the museum.
"We made a conscious decision that this was going to
be a kind of audio art zine," Mr. Samis said. "And we weren't going to draw any hard and fast boundaries about whether you
listened to it in the museum or during your commute." The museum offers a $2 discount on admission to anyone showing an MP3
player with the museum's podcasts on it; it is also sponsoring a contest in which amateurs are invited to submit their own
podcasts, the best of which will be featured alongside the museum's.
The museum's monthly recordings, called "Artcasts,"
do feel less like audio tours than like slightly cerebral radio shows you might catch while driving to work. They can run
longer than half an hour and in the last few months have featured William Kentridge, the South African artist, talking about
one of his works on view; interviews with patrons looking at Chuck Close self-portraits ("It's amazing how many different
ways you can do the same thing," one viewer said); a cellist performing music inspired by the art of Bruce Conner; and even
a breathy reading by J T Leroy, the waifish writer who later turned out to be the creation of a San Francisco woman named
Laura Albert.
Mr. Samis said he and his colleagues were still tinkering
with the feel of their podcasts, which they want to sound like an "alterative to the tried and true, you might say hackneyed,
canonical audio tour." The podcasts are made with the help of Antenna Audio, Mr. Samis said, but he decided last year against
using one of the company's voice-over professionals because the man's voice sounded "too official." Another of the company's
commentators was chosen, with a very National Public Radio polish to his voice. "It's still a little bit more than what we
want," he said. "We're not looking for Mr. Museum Voice. Not Charlton Heston."
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