www.blogs. guardian.co.uk, November 2007

Sound Investment: How I Learned to Love Audio Guides

Purists snigger at the thought of audio gallery tours, but are they snobbishly dismissing an experience that can enrich our appreciation of art?

So, Andrea Fraser has outwitted the herd of headsets at Tate Modern. The American artist has strung together a witty, subversive homage to the audio tour, devouring well-meaning voiceover commentaries with the stylistic panache of hip-hop's legendary cut-up artists sampling their parents' rare groove vinyl. It's an irony-laden assessment of the contemporary gallery visitor's experience, though I'm not sure who exactly is the butt of the joke.

For me, audio guides always smacked of being the lazy person's approach to visiting galleries. The soothing intro might as well begin thus: "It's bank holiday, so switch off your own free will, suppress any sense of spontaneous wandering, and submit to our rigid commentary, denying what under other circumstances might have been a serendipitous voyage of personal discovery. You will enjoy this, because we will tell you what to like." No thanks.

This, I now admit, was a foolish prejudice. On a recent trip to the Bilbao Guggenheim I found half the galleries closed for a rehang, and was handed a free audio guide as consolation prize (huh). I wound up stalking Richard Serra's giant, maze-like spiral structures in search of some divine enlightenment. I'll give anything a go once, I thought, eyeing the PDA hanging clunkily like an eighties remote control around my neck.

With no sign near to hand in the hangar-like space, I prodded random combinations of three-digit integers until eventually - hey presto! - Serra's sexy drawl came flooding into my ears. Boy, was I hooked. Twice I played out the 15-minute chapter of classic Serra oratory as I wandered his architectural mazes, lost in his "philosophy". "Architects making so-called sculptural buildings - they are not sculpture", he raved, right here in Gehry's Guggenheim. Unbelievable! Hardly an anecdote you'd find in the official catalogue.

And such, I discovered, was the secret joy of audio guides, a conspiratorial whisper in the breeze. In the age of podcasting, audio tours ought to be sparkling examples of the new, all-singing, all-dancing multimedia rich "content" that every cultural consumer is dying to buy into. Audio tours, like this Louise Bourgeois guide, need never be the poor relations of primary school phonics lessons any longer. Yet can they shrug off their cardigans to become sexy and cool?

Tate Britain's current Turner Prize Retrospective audio tour certainly fancies itself as such, dispensing with the ugly hardware for a start. Produced by Antenna Audio, Dazed & Confused's Francesca Gavin - a regular blogger here - introduces you to the nicotine-faded overtures of the art world's finest talking heads, all for £3 when accessed from your mobile - not a headphone in sight. It seems they've got the necessary calibre of speakers to ignite a meaningful debate.

But are Tate and the rest offering a genuinely useful service, or should they let us stick to forming our own opinions?

See more: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/11/sound_investment_how_i_learned.html
Author: Fiona Sibley