BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. New media technology in the hands of an engaged citizenry has been breaking down institutional walls. Blogging, podcasting, cell phone cameras, bandwidth galore, it all allows just plain Joe to become a journalist, a commentator, or an entertainer. Now, and when you think of it, it seems inevitable, the democratization of media is being applied to museum audio tours.

LEE SIEGEL: This painting is at the very best a third rate painting. The composition is what my grandmother used to call, "ongapatchka," which means in Yiddish overcrowded. And my grandmother never even made it to the Met. She was lucky to get out of Macy's during a white sale.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Lee Siegel's audio commentary produced for Slate about Fernand Leger's 1929 painting, Still Life, which hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why rent the museum's stodgy, bulky audio guide when you can download Siegel on your iPod and hear about his grandmother for free? But it was really Professor David Gilbert who came up with the concept of a podcast alternative audio guide when he started a group called Art Mobs and assigned his students to remix the Museum of Modern Art. Cheryl Stoever is one of the students who worked on the project. She did a commentary about Picasso's portrait of women in a brothel, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with her art history teacher Jason Rosenfeld. Cheryl, Jason, welcome to the show.

CHERYL STOEVER &

JASON ROSENFELD: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, first the basics. Jason, what is Art Mobs?

JASON ROSENFELD: It essentially was a podcasting project at Marymount Manhattan College, where students did recordings for Professor David Gilbert's class in Communication Arts to do tours of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.

CHERYL STOEVER: Our assignment basically was to come up with an audio guide that could relate to people that normally wouldn't necessarily get an audio guide at the museum because they found it dry or uninteresting or whatever their reasons were. The reason we did the podcast the way we did was because it was - the irreverence was what drew younger people to the museum and to these different pieces and, you know, got them thinking about them in different ways that they wouldn't have before.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's get down to particulars here and talk about how your Art Mobs audio commentary differs quite extensively from that of MoMA's. And I think we could use the famous Picasso picture, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, that has five women, naked, angular. A couple of them are standing in rather blatant positions, and two of them appear to have sort of African masks for faces. Here's a little slice of the MoMA guide.

JOHN ELDERFIELD (AUDIO GUIDE): Some people have spoken about Picasso's discovery of African tribal art. The figures at the right, one above the other, were repainted after Picasso had looked at examples of African tribal art, with its magical qualities. Other people have spoken of his ambivalent feeling towards women, and the sense of these unpleasant looking women looking at the observer as being associated to the idea of disease, linking sexuality to not only pleasure but fright.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I have to admit I kind of like that old duffer. I think he's, he's helping me understand that picture. What do you think of it, Cheryl?

CHERYL STOEVER: Oh, no, definitely. But were I to listen to that for seven or ten minutes, I might drift off.

JASON ROSENFELD: Seven to ten minutes?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It would take you less time than that, Jason?

JASON ROSENFELD: I think so. You know, John Elderfield is a senior curator at MoMA and he's a terrific scholar and curator, and he's the person narrating that. He's giving you the sense that what you are listening to is the spoken truth of modern art, and I think that there's totally a place for that. But what we thought to do was to do it in two ways differently. The first way was to have a conversation, and the second thing was to liven it up.

AUDIO GUIDE SOUNDTRACK:

JASON ROSENFELD: Actually, you know what, I've read some stuff about this painting. It's actually about STDs.

CHERYL STOEVER: It's about STDs?

JASON ROSENFELD: Yes.

CHERYL STOEVER: Because you can get STDs from going to a whorehouse?

JASON ROSENFELD: True. Or syphilis. And people in the 19th century and the early 20th century were obsessed by sexually transmitted diseases. They didn't have condoms.

CHERYL STOEVER: Mmm hmm.

JASON ROSENFELD: There were a lot of Catholics.

CHERYL STOEVER: Mmm hmm.

JASON ROSENFELD: And there were people dying of these kinds of diseases all the time. And Picasso's obsessed by it, as well, in these kinds of paintings, of these women who the two in the middle look kind of cute - but the ones on the side are, are quite demonic.

CHERYL STOEVER: Well, they have syphilis.

JASON ROSENFELD: You think?

CHERYL STOEVER: Oh yeah. (END AUDIO GUIDE EXCERPT)

JASON ROSENFELD: The content that you're getting about the artists and what the picture is, quote, unquote, "about" is all real, is all true. But we are I wouldn't want to say masking it because we're sort of interweaving that with a discussion which is quite different from the sort of dulcet tones and the sense of magnitude that you get in these audio guides.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Throughout the course of this project, have you listened to other alternative audio art commentaries? And are there any that stick out for you?

JASON ROSENFELD: Well, we didn't listen to any before because they didn't really exist. I mean, this is honestly something that has now started to bubble a little bit in the wake of this project.

CHERYL STOEVER: Well, the one thing I can say where I got inspiration from was the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert did a great piece on The Gates.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's just stop for a moment here and say that this was an enormous project, a series of huge orange curtains running across like lay lines all through Central Park, one of the projects of the famous artist team Christo and Jeanne Claude.

CHERYL STOEVER: Yes. Well, Steven Colbert sort of made fun of them.

STEPHEN COLBERT: The Gates posits a chromatic orgy. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] This riot of color achieves a rare re defamiliarization with the nature [DAILY SHOW AUDIENCE LAUGHS] of place/time, the whatness of our whereness. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] No longer framed I'm sorry, I've run out of crap. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There's an old saying that war is too important to be left to the generals. Do you think that art's too important to be left to the art historians?

JASON ROSENFELD: No. [LAUGHTER] The art historian can never -

CHERYL STOEVER: Speaking as an art historian -

JASON ROSENFELD: - ever, ever be replaced.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

JASON ROSENFELD: No, it's the right question, I think, because works of art are, are made in the main for the mass public. At least they are today, you know. And they're meant to comment on society and be a vibrant aspect of society. And we should be able to, academics and, you know, laymen alike, should be able to find a way to engage with art that is not intimidating.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you've sort of democratized the Museum of Modern Art. And I never thought it could be done.

CHERYL STOEVER: Actually a French writer in one of the newspapers in France actually wrote that when our project first came out. It's a really cool way of looking at it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much, Cheryl Stoever.

CHERYL STOEVER: [CHUCKLES] Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Jason Rosenfeld, thanks to you.

JASON ROSENFELD: Thanks very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Cheryl Stoever is a student, and Jason Rosenfeld an assistant professor at Marymount Manhattan College. They have their audio tour. And MoMA has its. Deborah Schwartz is the Deputy Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art. She says the usage of MoMA's audio guides is way up.

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ: We have about 33 percent of our visitors using audio guides at the moment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A third?

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ: A third of our audience. That has been true since about July 1st, when we were able to offer people audio tours for free. Prior to that, it was about five percent. What we've done is actually taken the audio that we have in the museum available to people, and we've put it both on our website and we've also made an arrangement with iTunes so that people can, in fact, if they want to download for free from iTunes our audio guides and have them on their own MP3 players.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, one group that seems to have gotten the ball rolling even faster, and they used MoMA as their subject, is something called Art Mobs. Have you heard any of their alternative tours?

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ: I certainly have. We were intrigued by it. We thought it was a fabulous teaching tool. We saw the possibilities, particularly within the context of a college or university, but also for the context of a very young population that's using iPods and other MP3 players all the time. So we, of course, immediately went to their site and started to listen to what they had done. It's very funny. Part of what's so delightful about it, actually, is they're having fun. And embedded in the sort of comedy routine [CHUCKLES] they're doing are lots of bits and pieces of truth, lots of things about either Picasso or the picture that are actually real pieces of information about it. So I actually think it's quite delightful. And it is interesting. It is certainly not the perspective that the museum would put on our audio guide, has put on our audio guide. It's not the kind of tone. But I think it's kind of wonderful.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But, I mean, what happens if these sort of more fun, less authoritative versions begin to overtake the authoritative ones? Would MoMA then become concerned?

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ: I guess we're not really concerned. It's hard for me to imagine that this eclipses completely the desire for people to have also somebody who has studied and has a sort of scholarly perspective on the work. It just doesn't seem likely to me. In fact, it seems to me that it enhances the possibilities for peoples' engagement.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thanks very much.

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ: You're welcome. It's a pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Deborah Schwartz is the Deputy Director for Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (MUSIC UP AND OVER)

JOHN ELDERFIELD (AUDIO GUIDE): Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was, in fact, the most carefully prepared picture that Picasso ever painted.

JASON ROSENFELD: What do you think about the women in these paintings?

CHERYL STOEVER: I think they're all naked.