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.

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.