For museumgoers, the advent of cell phone tours is changing the experience in more ways than one. Not only can people use their phones to tour exhibitions, dialing an access number and then punching in codes for each exhibit, but, depending on how a museum sets up the service, they might also have the option to comment on what they see, vote on their favorite artworks, access the tours from home, or receive text messages about upcoming exhibitions. Soon they’ll even be able to get images and museum maps on their phones.

The tours, however, are not without their drawbacks. While it was once against the rules to tramp through the galleries with a cell phone glued to your ear, museums have had to relax their “no cell phone” policies to allow for the tours. While Frank says she hasn’t noticed many people abusing the rewritten rules at the Phillips Collection, Isken says that at MOCA communicating to visitors that it’s OK to use cell phones to listen to tours but not to chat has been a challenge. “Everyone is using them in the galleries now,” she says. “People are talking and listening to messages—we really pretty much obliterated our cell phone policy.” She adds that some artists, when asked to record bits for cell tours, strongly opposed allowing visitors to use their phones. In fact, sculptor Robert Gober wrote a letter to MOCA, calling the idea “hideous,” saying, “I cannot say forcefully enough what a horrible idea this is. Museums should be cell-phone free.”

“Barbara Kruger basically said the same thing in a nice way,” Isken says. “But Jeff Koons said he would be thrilled to do it, so it’s not by any means unanimous.”

Isken adds that sound quality in the phone tours isn’t as polished as the traditional studio-recorded guides, but that can be a boon in some cases. “There’s a trade-off in quality—you kind of get a scratchy quality—but they’re kind of guerrilla, and they’re from the real artists,” she says. And, she says, adding another layer of education to the museum experience is always worth it. “People learn in all kinds of different ways, and we’re offering as many different ways to learn as we can.”

“This is really making information about art accessible to a wide range of people, some of whom probably would not use the traditional audio tours,” Frank adds. “It has the potential to make the museum experience a much richer and more engaging experience for the public, and that’s a real highlight.” She predicts the tours will improve over time, both in sound quality and the number of offerings: “We’re just at the tip of exploring how we can use this technology. We can make it work in ways we’re just beginning to discover.”

"Calling All Museums" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine.