Podcasting and the Arts

In two days, I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area, and while I am cruising the Northern California freeways, I will be listening to San Francisco radio station KYCY-AM, the first station in the nation to devote all of their programming to podcasts.

What is podcasting, you ask? Podcasting emerged last year as an online phenomenon, allowing amateurs to distribute audio programming over the Web. Listeners can subscribe to certain programs, download them and play them later on digital music players such as Apple Computer's iPod. The station plans to select programming based on listeners' interests and daily feedback and evolve to 24-hour programming.

All of a sudden, podcasting is becoming a huge phenonmena. ABC News and NBC News each plunged into the world of podcasting last week with plans to offer TV newscasts as on-demand audio programs over the Web. National Public Radio also offers some of its shows in podcast format.

But, now something new in the world of podcasts...alternate museum tour tapes done by amateurs and art professionals. For instance, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you can rent a tape for $5 and listen to informative talks about painter Jackson Pollock while you walk around the museum viewing his paintings.

Or, you can also download, for free, an audio discussion of Pollock's works by David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, done with a group of his students, in which they discuss the works with a distinctly collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the newest adaptations in the world of podcasting...museum tours with a different point of view.

Specifically, these museum guides are an outgrowth of a recent podcasting trend called "sound seeing," in which people record narrations of their travels, such as walking on the beach, or wandering through the French Quarter, and upload them onto the Internet for others to enjoy. In that spirit, the creators of the unauthorized guides to the Modern have also invited anyone interested to submit his or her own tour for inclusion on the project's Web site, mod.blogs.com/art_mobs. (Instructions are on the Web site.)

In the museum world, where the popularity of audio tours has grown tremendously over the last decade, the use of commercial MP3 players seems to be catching on. Officials at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have discussed putting their new audio guide material on the Web for downloading to portable players. Last year, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo lent viewers iPods to use as audio guides for one exhibition, and Apple Computer has helped the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley of France do the same thing, using the sonorous voice of the actor Michael Lonsdale.

But the rise of podcasting is now enabling museumgoers not simply to enjoy audio guides on a sleeker-looking device but also to concoct their own guides and tours. 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.

There are other examples of podcasting being used in museum walking tours. In any case, it would be fun to listen to them, in addition to the ones that are available at the museums. I recall how much I enjoyed listening to the narratives provided at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris as I walked around looking at the works of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Whistler, Degas and the other famous painters whose works hang in that wonderful museum. Perhaps next time, I will take a podcast to get a different point of view.