The Brooklyn Museum has found a new, 21st-century way for visitors to navigate its galleries: Pick out an artwork on your iPhone and let the Web do the curating for you.

This week, the New York museum launched its self-guided smart-phone tours, akin to audio tours of old but with one major difference: Nothing is preordained. Neither the museum nor the mobile device knows where it’s going to take you.

Instead, the tours are personalized as you go along (think iTunes’s Genius feature), and they work on any Internet-enabled phone. This isn’t simply an iPhone app, or a program that works only on a device on loan from the museum. It’s essentially a new way to make sense of the building’s sprawling galleries, and to ensure that a visitor doesn’t miss an artwork in tune with his or her tastes.

Shelley Bernstein, the museum’s chief of technology and developer of the smart-phone tours, explains how to get started: “There’s signage in each room that says where to point your browser, which floor, and which room you’re in.” The system will recognize them instantly. “Then, based on what’s in here, it will show you what past users have recommended.”

A number of pictures will pop up on the screen. If you like something, tap its image, then hit “Recommend,” a button prominently placed at the top of the screen. From there, your phone will call up miniatures of other pieces in the room that users who share your tastes have chosen.

The idea is for the phone to create a piece-by-piece map, which prompts a user to go from one piece to the next. Having a separate code for each room means visitors can tackle one gallery at a time. “My hope is that it’s like a scavenger hunt,” says Bernstein of the tour. “You actually go find the thing. I want it to become an aid, literally a guide to go find stuff, not a multimedia tour that’s just television-watching.”

There’s also the option to curate your own sets of works (think playlists) at home, which the museum will recognize on-site once you type a certain gallery’s code into your phone. Any works in the room that are part of your set will automatically pop up. You also have the option of following other people’s sets, as well as the ability to take yourself off a path via a thumbs-up/thumbs-down option if you find yourself following artwork you’re just not that into.

Reject something enough times, and your phone will automatically release you from said set. “Eventually,” says Bernstein, “we want to move to creating sets on the fly, while you’re here.”

The Brooklyn Museum has always placed community and “visitor friendliness” high on its list of priorities, Bernstein says, which is why this nontraditional tour seemed a more obvious fit for the institution than the more traditional variety.

“With older guides,” she explains — like audio and pamphlets — “it’s entirely structured. But we’ve had a very successful online presence for a while now, and we have a community on the Web that contributes, and my hope is that this is a way to bridge that gap.” The tour, she adds, “is a way for us to take our tech presence and combine it with a gallery in a way that’s not completely overwhelming.”

She continues, “We’re the first to do a recommendation system that’s based on community. There are definitely museums that are doing some cool multimedia guides” — she cites the Indianapolis Museum of Arts new Davis LAB — “but we’ve been doing community for so long on the Web that it makes sense for us, in terms of our mission, to focus on the visitor.”

Plus, there’s the one-of-a-kind, personal feel of the guides. It’s “completely unpredictable,” Bernstein says. “It’s like a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book.”