User participation

Last week, the New York Times ran a story about museums, Web 2.0 and user participation in collections: Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum. It mentions a few museums that encourage visitor contributions of objects, information and/or opinions, including one I'm looking forward to seeing: "the Museum of Afghan Civilization, an entirely Web-based institution scheduled to make its debut later this year."

The article refutes the idea that inviting user participation is inviting chaos, and points out that rather than threatening curatorial authority, it enhances it - museums are still clearly providing the narrative and expertise for their collections, but they're doing it in a way that earns respect. Here's a good quote from Michael Edson, Smithsonian's new-media director: "I think the public genuinely does want the Smithsonian to assert its authority, but in this epoch authority and trust will be granted to institutions differently — through transparency, speed and a public orientation." Yes!

And Nina Simon is quoted a few times as well: "There’s a difference between having power and having expertise. Museums will always have the expertise, but they may have to be willing to share the power." Yes!

Online catalogues and photography bans

Exciting news: LACMA to publish exhibition catalogues online (via Modern Art Notes). This is part of a Getty Foundation initiative to publish scholarly catalogues online. It seems like a great use of technology to make scholarship more available and up-to-date, both of which should be part of the educational missions of such museums.

Disappointing news: National Archives to ban photography (via the Washington Post). DCist offers a pretty reasonable opinion about it; apparently, the Archives recently changed their UV filters to make the documents appear in true color, but the new filters make them more vulnerable to flash photography. If the primary purpose really is preservation of the documents, that's understandable, and to be honest I wouldn't have expected photography to have been permitted before (I've never visited). Still, it is unfortunate that the Archives is forced to take a step away from making these things freely available to "reproduce."

Portrait of the Photographer's Mother

Slightly similar in theme to my post yesterday, here's another artist taking a recognizable image and rendering it in a different medium, as something new in form and meaning but visually still related:



I like how Aline Smithson brings her own mother, her own medium, and her own sense of humor to Whistler's idea. You can see the whole series on her website, but this one is my personal favorite.

"Stolen" Jewels

Some museums and archives are hesitant about making images of their collections available online because they want to guard their reproduction rights. If it can be downloaded for free, why would anyone pay for the rights to use an image? Assuming that repositories really are entitled to control and earn income from the use of images they hold (a whole other debate entirely), one way that museums make collections available online while protecting them from theft is to offer only low-resolution images. That way, collections are freely available to be seen, but someone hoping to print an image in a book or on a greeting card would still need to go through the museum to get a reproduction of appropriate quality.

But what if the whole point is to grab low-res images?



"Stolen Jewels" by Mike and Maaike is "an exploration of tangible vs virtual in relation to real and perceived value." The designers used Google's image search to download low-res pictures of expensive jewelry, then doctored the images and printed them on leather. Though they emphasize the "stolen" part, these are, of course, new, original creations now.



Their point is to subvert value - the value of the actual jewels, which were rendered as digital images, which were then rendered again as new tangible pieces of jewelry. What's interesting is not just the perceived value of the original objects - it's not the jewelry that's "stolen," it's the images. That raises all kinds of provocative questions about the value of digital images and how effectively someone can really claim and enforce ownership over them, especially as it relates to museums. (One of the jewels Mike and Maaike "stole" is the Hope Diamond. I don't know whether the Smithsonian holds the rights to images of the Hope Diamond - if it does, could it reasonably claim that this almost unrecognizable blue blob is an infringement? And if not - if the Hope Diamond is in the public domain - what did Mike and Maaike really "steal"?)