Great art does not need a soundtrack

I heard horror stories about exhibitions of Canaletto with loudspeakers pumping out Vivaldi

I'd been looking forward to one of the Victoria and Albert Museum's spring exhibitions for quite some time. Indian Mughal painting is something I adore without knowing a great deal about it, and would always hurry to see an exhibition of the subject.

In almost every way, the V&A's bringing together of many of the paintings commissioned by the Emperor Akbar in 1556 to illustrate the stories of the Hamzanama is a revelation. It is a fascinating moment in Mughal painting, when the traditional Persian court styles start to interact with wilder innovations, and the museum has done extremely well to get so many of them in the same place at once. I recommend it to anyone, with one appalling caveat.

As you go round the exhibition, your attention keeps wandering to a strange noise in the background. If you are as old-fashioned as me, and used to quiet in museums, at first it is slightly difficult to believe what you are hearing. The exhibition, which, with its excellent catalogue, is about as serious and enlightening as it is possible to be, is accompanied by a soundtrack of twanging on a sitar. It is the sort of thing you used to hear in curry houses on a Friday night.

The V&A tell me that the decision to include this music, which I can't quite believe is even historically appropriate, was that of the designer of the exhibition. Well, they have done a good job deciding the colour of the walls and arranging the lighting, but someone ought to have told them very briskly that they weren't entitled to start damaging the whole impact of the exhibition. In my view, as soon as you add a soundtrack to an exhibition, you turn it into "The Mughal Experience", and make the pictures much more difficult to look at.

As yet, this is a limited phenomenon, but one which is spreading fast. I had heard horror stories about American exhibitions of Canaletto with loudspeakers in the corner pumping out Vivaldi, but didn't quite believe it until Tate Modern mounted their Century/City show. Incredibly, we were asked at the Tate to look at Picasso to the raucous accompaniment of Petrushka, and the bold modernism of Rio in the 1950s was accompanied by some fairly nondescript Brazilian pop.

Since then, it has been spreading steadily; I blame the rise of the ghastly recorded lecture which galleries keep trying to foist on you. At the Aztec show, between the paragraphs, they had stuck in some fairly embarrassing jungle sound effects. That sort of thing is not so bad if it is restricted to the hired tape, which you can avoid, but when there is no escape it damages what may otherwise be a first-rate exhibition.

Is this just personal taste? After all, I'm sure that a museum would say, "Well, people seem to like it."

I don't think so. I think it isn't a picturesque addition to the rooms, like the pretty oriental cushions scattered round the V&A show, but an active diminishment of the serious effects of the art.

The truth is that you would only think of treating art like this if, deep down, you don't think of it as having a strong life of its own. The painting that needed pepping up with a cheery song is not a painting worth looking at.

And, as far as I know, no one has thought of proposing to Damien Hirst that his shows would benefit from a simultaneous performance of the orchestral works of Sir Harrison Birtwistle. But that is the exact equivalent of the way some museum curators are prepared to treat even the most exciting works of the past.

The battle against Muzak in restaurants in this country has pretty well been fought and won; you don't come across it in any restaurant with any pretensions to style these days. It was almost nostalgic, last year, to visit Australia and have all those old arguments with a maitre d' about whether people liked it. But in museums, with scholars increasingly losing arguments with designers, I am afraid we are going to have the argument all over again.

I have nothing against music in its place: in concert halls, on the radio, on the record player. But it is something with a life of its own, and something which can't be kept in its place.

There are some pieces of music which, in restaurants, will make you put down your knife and fork; there are some, like Petrushka at Tate Modern, which effectively prevent you from looking at a painting. Museums, I feel, ought to want you to look at art with your full attention, just as restaurants should want you to appreciate their food. It seems quite a simple point.

The one ray of hope I hold out is that I understand that in this case, the V&A, which is a humane and a considerate organisation, has told the poor guards at the Hamzanama show that if they can't stand the endless repetitions of the tape, they can turn the thing off.

I could not recommend this show more, and I hope everyone goes to it regardless. But I would also recommend a spot of incitement in that direction. Because if the musical accompaniment becomes an irritant after an hour's visit, it is impossible to imagine how you would feel, sitting through it all day long. Do them a favour; do yourself a favour; and do the Hamzanama a favour, and complain. This sort of thing can't be allowed to spread.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk