The front page of today’s New York Times has a
terrific story about hacking the museum experience and creating your own
homespun audio tours.  About a month ago we - along with our friend Gaetane -
recorded our thoughts while visiting the Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn
Museum of Art.  It immediately became one of the most popular audio downloads
from the Wooster site.

Our hope is that the Times article spurs more
people to record their own audio tours.  If you do, send us a link and we’ll
highlight it on the Wooster site.  In ther next couple of weeks we’ll be
creating new audio tours for a range of exhibitions including Barry McGee at the
Deitch and Larry Clark at ICP.

In case you missed it, here’s the
article from today’s NYT….

With Irreverence and an iPod,
Recreating the Museum Tour

By RANDY KENNEDY

If
you soak up the Jackson Pollocks at the Museum of Modern Art while listening to
the museum’s official rented $5 audio guide, you will hear informative but
slightly dry quotations from the artist and commentary from a renowned curator.
(“The grand scale and apparently reckless approach seem wholly American.”)
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But the other day, a college student, Malena Negrao, stood in front of
Pollock’s “Echo Number 25,” and her audio guide featured something a little more
lively. “Now, let’s talk about this painting sexually,” a man’s deep voice said.
“What do you see in this painting?”

A woman, giggling, responded on
the audio track: “Oh my God! You’re such a pervert. I can’t even say what that -
am I allowed to say what that looks like?”

The exchange sounded a lot
more like MTV than Modern Art 101, but for Ms. Negrao it had a few things to
recommend it. It was free. It didn’t involve the museum’s audio device, which
resembles a cellphone crossed with a nightstick. And best of all, it was
slightly subversive: an unofficial, homemade and thoroughly irreverent audio
guide to MoMA, downloaded onto her own iPod.

The creators of this
guide, David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan
College, and a group of his students, describe it on their Web site as a way to
“hack the gallery experience” or “remix MoMa,” which they do with a distinctly
collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the
newest adaptations in the world of podcasting - downloading radio shows, music
and kitchen-sink audio to an MP3 player.

Specifically, these museum
guides are an outgrowth of a recent podcasting trend called “sound seeing,” in
which people record narrations of their travels - walking on the beach,
wandering through the French Quarter - and upload them onto the Internet for
others to enjoy. In that spirit, the creators of the unauthorized guides to the
Modern have also invited anyone interested to submit his or her own tour for
inclusion on the project’s Web site, mod.blogs.com/art_mobs. (Instructions are
on the Web site.)

In the museum world, where the popularity of audio
tours has grown tremendously over the last decade, the use of commercial MP3
players seems to be catching on. Officials at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis have discussed putting their new audio guide material on the Web for
downloading to portable players. Last year, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo lent
viewers iPods to use as audio guides for one exhibition, and Apple Computer has
helped the Chateau de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley of France do the same
thing, using the sonorous voice of the actor Michael Lonsdale.

But
the rise of podcasting is now enabling museumgoers not simply to enjoy audio
guides on a sleeker-looking device but also to concoct their own guides and
tours. A New York art Web site, woostercollective.com, recently made a sound-
seeing tour of the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum,
which the Web site’s creators made in hushed tones while wandering through the
show, sometimes quoting from the museum’s official audio guide, which they
listened to as they chatted.

At Marymount, on the Upper East Side,
Dr. Gilbert said he was partly inspired to create the unofficial guides after
listening to the museum’s audio tours for children, which he found much more
entertaining and engaging than the new ones recently introduced for grown-
ups.

But Dr. Gilbert said his larger point was to try to teach his
students to stop being passive information consumers - whether through
television, radio or an official audio guide - and to take more control, using
as his model the guru of so-called remix culture, Lawrence Lessig, a professor
at Stanford Law School.

“It’s not incumbent on us to, you know,
praise the art necessarily,” Dr. Gilbert said recently at the museum, wearing
neon-green sunglasses and leading a group of students through the underground
tour. “That’s part of the playfulness and fun of this project. If we want to say
something irreverent or something scathing about the art, that can come out.”
(In the name of politeness, the project’s Web site does tip its hat to the
Modern: “Apologia: We love MoMA. Hackers hack a platform out of respect for
it.”) Informed about the project last week, museum officials declined to
reciprocate with their opinions, but also made no comments about instituting an
iPod ban.

So far, the unofficial guides cover only a few of the
museum’s works - by artists like Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Picasso,
Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall, whose well-known “I and the Village” comes in for
a critical pummeling by Jason Rosenfeld, a Marymount professor of art history,
who calls it “the worst, most reductive kind of art” and blames Chagall for all
the “ugly menorahs” and tacky stained-glass windows in modern synagogues.
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“It’s the worst style that ever developed in the history of art,” he
declares.

A visceral Bacon painting called “Painting” (1946) gets an
all-music treatment that sometimes sounds like Metallica. Beckmann receives a
dark hip-hop soundtrack. (“If anybody cares/ I’ll be in the basement slitting my
throat/ Happy New Year.”) And the Pollock guide, while mostly sex-obsessed, does
include the owner of the deep voice, John Benton, another Marymount
communication professor, talking about Pollock’s calligraphic technique and his
references to Roman art.

But lest any of this become boring, the
discussion is also sprinkled with driving guitar riffs from the 1970’s song
“Peaches,” by the Stranglers, along with echo effects and the sound of a woman
moaning in pleasure.

“That’s not me doing that,” stressed Ms. Negrao,
a Marymount junior who is one of the women’s voices on the Pollock guide.
“That’s a sound effect.”

Last week, as she and her fellow students
Liza Pastore, Cheryl Stoever and Aubrey Strickland gathered in a semicircle in
front of the Pollock, other museumgoers crowding by would slow down and stare,
wondering why the women were laughing and what they were hearing through those
familiar white iPod earphones.

Later, in front of Ms. Sherman’s
“Untitled No. 92,” the group roped in a stranger, Ashkan Sahihi, and persuaded
him to listen along on one of their iPods to a funny and sometimes silly
recorded exchange between students and professors about the photograph, with the
soundtrack from the movie “Kill Bill” blasting in the background.

Mr.
Sahihi smiled and bobbed his head to the beat and later pronounced the student
production much better than the last audio guide he’d heard (and that was an
official one narrated by David Bowie).

“Anybody who listens to those
guides that you really get in museums,” he said, “you get pretty tired because
usually it’s a very drawn-out explanation of why the museum was willing to pay
so much money for a picture.”

“This is not just some expensive name
telling me about expensive art,” he added. “Plus, it’s funny.”