"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"?)