If you happen to be perusing Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, and if you happen to have a question about any of the 39 place settings in the mammoth installation, just whip out your cell phone and dial up Chicago herself—or the next best thing, anyway. The museum’s free cell phone audio tour features comments recorded by Chicago, as well as curators, scholars, and other artists who worked on the project.

“I set out to make a work of art that could teach women’s history,” Chicago’s confident voice greets visitors who dial in.

An extensive cell phone tour also accompanied the museum’s landmark “Global Feminisms” exhibition last year and featured a staggering number of artists from the show discussing their relationship to feminism. “Cell phone audio has helped us in many ways,” Shelley Bernstein, the museum’s manager of information systems, wrote on the museum’s blog. “One of the nice things about the new production method is that tour stops can be recorded via phone, similar to leaving a standard voice mail message. Since [“Global Feminisms”] consists of work by approximately 80 women artists from around the world, we found this aspect incredibly helpful in producing our tour.”

The Brooklyn Museum is not alone in trading in its old shoulder-strap audio guides for cell phone tours. Dave Asheim, founder of the San Francisco–based Guide by Cell, one of the largest companies providing the technology for cell phone–based audio tours, says more than 50 art museums across the country—including such high-profile institutions as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles—have signed on for the service, along with more than 120 other cultural institutions.

“Cell phones will become the most commonly used device for interpretation in museums,” Asheim says. “It simply follows what is happening outside museum walls. Cell phones are becoming cheaper, more popular, and more embedded in providing the functionality that other devices used to provide.”

The tours are attractive to museums, because they are substantially cheaper to produce than studio-recorded audio guides, which can cost several thousands of dollars for a single tour. Most museums using Guide by Cell simply pay a monthly subscription fee of about $200, and visitors use their own cell minutes, according to Asheim. Recording the tours is as easy as leaving a voice mail, and the museum retains copyright for the recordings, unlike the old audio tours, where copyright stayed with the producer. Plus, tour stops are easy to rerecord on the fly if a mistake is found or if more information is needed, says Sue Frank, assistant curator at the Washington, D.C.–based Phillips Collection, which first used the tours for its “Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film” exhibition in February 2007, and has since used the technology for two more shows. “For a lot of institutions, the [older] audio guides are cumbersome and financially prohibitive,” Frank says. “This just provides so much more flexibility.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was an early adopter, first offering cell tours in January 2006 for the exhibition “Painting in Tongues.” “When we first heard about [cell tours], it sounded really wacky,” says Suzanne Isken, director of education at MOCA. “It was new and no one was doing it. But now museums have really latched on to it.” She adds that a cell phone tour for the museum’s current Takashi Murakami blockbuster, “© Murakami,” is one of MOCA’s most popular so far, featuring commentary by the sought-after artist himself.

Isken says museums can track the “pickup rate,” or number of people dialing in for the tours, and while institutions are just learning how to compute that data, she estimates that a desirable pickup rate would be about 10 percent of museum visitors. At the Phillips Collection, Frank says the numbers aren’t yet available, but the tours have been embraced most enthusiastically by teens and young adults.