In general, I dislike audio tours in museums. Not really because of the audio tour itself (I’ve never heard one) but because of the people that use them. They tend to cause people to stand in front of paintings for an overly long amount of time, cause bottlenecks all over the gallery, and really, they look daggy. I really don’t care what the curator’s interpretation of an artwork is, and I walk as fast as possible away from tour groups or people wearing headphones with the sound turned way up when I see them because I can’t stand the way they talk about art.

But perhaps sound seeing tours in galleries could change all that -

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.

I would have loved to have heard that when I visited the Basquiat exhibition in April!

When I visited MOMA, there were a small number of people with iPods, and I immediately assumed that they were listening to music. Perhaps they were actually listening to a gallery tour. Very cool.