Museums, by design, are contradictory in nature.They are public spaces that offer private encounters.Yet we accept, even welcome, the contradiction. As with places of worship, we go to museums to have powerfully personal experiences in communal settings. In the museum, our senses are heightened: Our relationship to the art changes our relationship to the world. While there, looking at pictures, we are just as apt to watch other people look at pictures – and we value that interactive, social aspect of the museum experience. Art, although it requires an intense,one-to-one engagement to be experienced fully, is ultimately best shared.

Yet when the social, or public and interactive, aspect of the museum experience intrudes upon the private aspect, the museum has ceased to perform its primary function, and becomes a detriment to the art. Increasingly in museums, media and technology (time-based audio/visual artworks; biographical, historical, and informational videos; research computers,and audio guides) are being valued at the expense of the private experience of art. Not only is there an increasing breakdown between the public and private realms in museums; the private realm may soon be a thing of the past.

An odd new “work” currently at the Whitney Museum – Jennifer Crowe and Scott Patterson’s interactive, sitespecific “Follow Through” (2005), which comprises a headset, the museum’s fifth-floor permanent collection, the Whitney’s audio guide recordings, multiple viewers, the museum guards, and a handheld MP3 player – takes on some of these aspects in a direct, albeit tongue-in-cheek manner. It’s the audio guide as art.

“Follow Through” acknowledges, through mockery, mimicry, and irony, the competition between the technological, interactive, social, and private realms of the museum experience. Basically, the work is a subtle, subversive, and often sophomoric performance piece that places the “viewer,” not the art, at the center of the museum.

After being given an MP3 player with the latest technology and a fancy display to listen to using headphones, you make your way through the permanent collection of the Whitney. At such artworks as Elie Nadelman’s “Tango” (c. 1919) or “Calder’s Circus” (1926-31), each marked with a number to correspond with the museum’s audio guide, you punch that number into the player.

You will then hear an edited snippet of the Whitney’s actual audio guide recording.At times they are well edited, making clear how academic, reductive, theory-based, and unrelated to the art works audio guides often can be. The male voiceover for Arshile Gorky’s “The Artist and His Mother” (c. 1926-36) – which works in Freudian psychology, “elective silence,” “very tightly closed mouths,”and “stuttering …mute”hands – though not completely without merit, had me laughing out loud.

As you listen to the recording, you are also given written instructions. There are roughly 50 separate sets. Sometimes shared by multiple works, sometimes work-specific, they are accompanied by visual icons (a hand, a body, a head, or feet) that mimic the positions or actions to be taken.

The creators of “Follow Through” are clearly familiar with museum-viewer body language and behavior, and most of these commands seem meant to parody or disrupt them.”Debate loudly in a foreign language,” you are instructed. “If you are monolingual, invent a language.” You are asked to stand close to the work of art or to your neighbor, to mimic your neighbor,to gasp,or to make eye contact with guards. But the commands are generally noninvasive. More often than not,they suggest you gesture, sway, point, count, sit down, scratch, or “ponder the asymmetry in the floor’s wood grain.”

A work like this, it seems, was waiting to happen. Its creators have noticed our growing attachment to technological crutches, and contemporary art’s increasing need to sidestep rather than engage with the art of the past. They also play off of our craving – at the expense of being lab rats or the butt of a joke – for 15 minutes of fame.

Ultimately, though,”Follow Through” is not as engaging or clever as it could be. (Indeed, by mocking the Whitney’s permanent collection, it puts an even larger wedge between artwork and viewer.) But that doesn’t matter. Its significance is not as an ineffectual last act of ironic defiance aimed at the noisy intrusion of the audio guide, but a harbinger of the even more intrusive technologies sure to come.

For the entire project is the result of a devil’s bargain of a proposal made by Antenna Audio (the provider of the technology) to the Whitney to commission a work that put their technology in museumgoers’ hands.This marriage between a technology-based business and the museum hints at a major shift in museum atmosphere and approach.

Museums will continue to place interactive toys in our hands, at the expense of the art on the walls and of the viewing public – such gadgetry gizmos that will attempt to substitute the intake of information for the experience of art. As the cancerous evolution of the audio guide continues, “Follow Through” seems less a hint of where we’re heading than a sign that the future is now.

Until January 29 (945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).