Podcasts, changing the way we see art
Permalink | May 19th, 2006
Museums are ushering in a new age of technology, slowly replacing those old audio tours with much more flexible, portable, and, more importantly, accessible podcasts.
In the spring of 2005, when a professor and a group of students at Marymount Manhattan College made waves by creating their own, unauthorized MP3 audio tour for the Museum of Modern Art, few art institutions were even exploring the idea of podcasting as an alternative to official audio tours, created by companies like Acoustiguide and Antenna Audio.
But in the short time since then, museum podcasts — both do-it-yourself versions and those created by museums themselves — have taken off, changing the look and feel of audio tours at places ranging from the venerable, like the Met and the Victoria and Albert, to the virtually unknown, like the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Ind., and the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia near San Francisco.
The podcasts are making countless hours of recorded information — like curators’ comments, interviews with artists and scholars, and even interviews with the subjects of some artwork — widely available to people who have never visited, and may never visit, the museums that are making the recordings. If, for example, you do not manage to make it to the Met to see Kara Walker’s show “After the Deluge,” you can still hear her talk about it while sitting on the subway or walking down the street.
How the iPod changed the music world art world world … let us count the ways.
[via NY Times]
