Art and education go hand-in-hand. While I worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago I realized that art IS education and contextualizing it for the general public is necessary. Part of my job there was to assist in producing audio tours. These audio tours were contained in wand-like devices that housed audio files of either the curators or exhibiting artists discussing selected artwork in an exhibition. Visitors purchased these audio tours for an additional fee at the admissions desks and were off to experience a one-person tour at their own pace. A non-perfected system, these types of tours are generally laughed at by the art community but, none-the-less, have the potentional to be a bridge the gap between gaining valuable insite and walking away confused.

Soon after I left, the MCA abandoned these tours as the production and equipment cost is quite high, and given the current financial strain on today's art centers, they were the first to go in an effort to conserve money. But boy are things a-changing. Now museums not only have the chance to improve on the nature of these tours but can now do it for a reasonable price. Forward-thinking museums in Japan and France (via MacNN) have adopted iPods to house MP3s of art folk discussing exhibitions. Since the iPod is inexpensive, holds an insane amount of files, is painfully simple to use, and can allow museums to easily rotate sound bytes about specific art pieces, it's almost crazy to think that more museums are not doing this! (United States, I'm talking to you).