Afew years ago I went to Arizona to preview a show that was coming to New York. After I had seen the exhibition, the museum’s director gave me a tour of her museum. When we came to one gallery – a small, posthumous show of paintings by a local artist and philanthropist – she took me inside and told me I was in for a real treat.

I thought she was referring to the artworks. But as I began to look at the paintings, she quickly directed me to a computer monitor at the back of the gallery, remarking that, being from New York, I certainly would be surprised and pleased with their museum’s burgeoning technology. At one point, when I had shifted my attention back to the paintings, she admonished me to “Look at the screen.” There, she excitedly explained, viewers – with a point, drag, and click – could change colors in the exhibition’s paintings, rotate shapes, and move forms from one picture to another.

“I’ll bet you didn’t expect to see this kind of technology out here in Arizona, did you?” she asked me. “No,” I replied, “I didn’t.” And she whisked me away to the museum cafe and gift shop. The museum director was attempting to sell me not on her collection but on her museum. I do not remember anything about the paintings in that show – not even if they were abstract or representational. But I was not supposed to. I was supposed to remember, which I do, that everything is up to date in Arizona.

Many museums today are intent to change with the times.They want to offer viewers all the comforts of home (computers, comfortable chairs, refreshments) – as well as artworks that feel as if they are hung not because of quality but instead to represent every possible stance and view of anyone who might enter the museum. In an attempt to make art-viewing as easy and up to date as possible, museums give the public what they think it wants rather than what it needs. But they are in danger of making themselves so user-friendly that they are no longer art-friendly.

This is true as much in New York as in Arizona – if not more. Indeed, in the current year alone we have already had the example of one badly misconceived museum renovation – the Brooklyn. This fall we will witness the grand revision of a great institution, MoMA.

At 630,000 square feet and $20 a head, the Museum of Modern Art, which will reopen on November 20th, will nearly double in size and admission price. A MoMA press release boasts that, when the museum reopens, it will “integrate innovative, on-demand technologies into the Museum’s operations [offering] technology for a personalized visitor experience.” I take this hyperbole to mean, sadly, more computer monitors and headsets.

The new MoMA will have two film theaters with digital surround sound and a large gallery “specially designed for the exhibition of moving-image and sound works from the period of the 1970s to the present.”The museum will also provide “a fine dining restaurant,” a bar, two cafes, and two bookstores, which will all be scattered throughout the museum (this in addition to the two MoMA Design Stores, one in SoHo and the other directly across the street from the museum). One of the bookstores,”a reader-friendly environment,” is positioned to compete with the ubiquitous sitting areas provided by bookstores such as Barnes and Noble,which set the precedent that a bookstore is no longer a bookstore if it is not also a library, a restaurant, and a lounge. That’s apparently now the case for museums as well.

I admit that when I am in the last gallery of a show and I hear the chingching of the cash register in the gift shop, like Pavlov’s dog I salivate for the exhibition catalog. And that, after a couple of hours looking at art, I have trouble concentrating because I am thinking about an espresso or glass of wine. Museum cafes and gift shops allow for that welcome escape from the realm of art into the realm of the everyday without leaving the museum. But the merging of those worlds is a bit of a devil’s bargain.

Worse, though, I would say, is the gradual insertion of technology and the curatorial into every aspect of the museumgoing experience. The thin end of the wedge in this area was the introduction of the now-ubiquitous audio guides. It first hit me that trouble was brewing in 1992 at MoMA’s Matisse retrospective.A woman told me to move away from an odalisque, because the painting was being talked about on her headset. But I knew we were near the beginning of the end when, standing in the Fragonard room at the Frick Collection a couple of years ago, a large ArtPhone audio guide slid loudly across the parquet floor and stopped at my feet. “Oh my God,” I thought, “not the Frick.”

I know that by never listening to audio guides or consulting museum computers I am missing out on some interesting information. But I also know that great art has plenty to tell me by itself. I always advise my students not to listen to audio guides even if they are free. “Do you need an audio guide,” I ask them, “telling you about the food you are eating while you enjoy a meal at Chanterelle? Do you want to listen to an audio guide while you read poetry, pray, or make love; while you listen to a concert or watch a play?”

Art demands concentration and commitment. To engage with a work of art is to engage in a personal relationship. It needs to be uninterrupted and free of distraction. Audio guides tell us we cannot be trusted to take in an artwork on our own, that we need to have art hand-fed to us.They also tell us that we are naked when we are technologically deprived.

It is getting to the point now where I can imagine people will begin to feel as if they cannot see a museum show without a technological crutch. This was hammered home recently when I visited my own neighborhood museum in Brooklyn, which has nearly been ruined by such thinking.

I had not been to the Brooklyn Museum since before the April unveiling of its new entrance and facade, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects – an architectural nightmare that makes the neoclassical McKim, Mead & White building look like it had collided with a set of bleachers. The new entrance was designed, according to a press release, to “create a more ex citing, welcoming, and focused visitor experience.” Arnold L. Lehman, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, states that “This bold and embracing design is the architectural embodiment of the Museum’s mission and institutional commitment to welcome all of its visitors and to enhance their museum-going experience. For the first time in its more than century-long history on this site, the building physically opens up to its surrounding neighborhood.”

Yes, because it has been gutted.

Inside, the space is vast and disorienting. It is remarkably unclear where to buy a ticket. The collections have been reinstalled around design schemes that mimic the themes of the art, transforming the galleries into cheap stage sets. In the Native-American galleries, columns have been painted to mask their function and walls have been decorated with horrible murals in hideous colors that overpower the art and turn the galleries into a Southwestern tourist attraction. In the Egyptian galleries, computer monitors, housed in ugly Egyptian-esque cases, are supposedly there to help viewers engage with the collection. An area of the museum devoted to European painting is smothered by wall text about choosing frames, and the artworks are separated from viewers by an obnoxiously high, fat railing. In many of the galleries the signage and ornamentation, only a few months old, are already peeling off the walls, giving the installations that depressing, faded air of holiday decorations left up too long.

I am not suggesting museums do away with audio guides, computers, and wall text. Or that they stop trying to sell art to the public. It is much too late for that. Museums are a business like any other, and obviously they think they know what they are doing. But museums cannot be all things to all people. They have to draw a line or they will lose their credibility. And their first rule should be to do no harm to the art with which they have been entrusted. And as far as I am concerned, the buzz of audio guides and the glare of computer screens harm the experience of art.

The Brooklyn Museum’s new entrance is certainly easier to access than would be steep steps (which were there in the original 1897 building and removed in 1934). But steep steps were put there precisely because they took effort to climb. The climb, from the ordinary world of the everyday to the elevated world of art, like the long walk up the aisle to the altar in a cathedral or the climb up the courthouse or library steps, is designed to give viewers a transition between lower and higher, to prepare them for the enormous difference between one plane and another.

This difference – indeed these planes – the Brooklyn Museum, among others, not only does not acknowledge but also seems hell-bent on eradicating.