As eloquently and thoughtfully explained in the blog “Peripheral Visions“, museums have been somewhat hesitant to expand into Internet realms, afraid perhaps of losing visitors who wouldn’t want to bother visiting the museum (and paying admission fees) to see things they’ve already seen online; also that museums are afraid of copyright law and of losing authority over their objects.
From my experience as a curatorial intern, I can definitely say I saw the same phenomenon at play. The vast majority of objects in museum collections belong in the public domain, their creators having lived before the advent of modern copyright law, and now long dead. Since when does the owner of an object, the collector, and not the creator hold copyright over something? And why should fine art objects, such as any given work by Van Gogh, Hokusai, da Vinci, or Ma Yuan be copyrighted, on account of being within the collection of a museum, while literary works, such as those by Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, are fully in the public domain? Personally, I completely do not get it. The fundamental purpose of museums is to share art, culture, and history with the world; they are at their core educational institutions devoted to making things available to the world. And yet, they are jealously protective of images of their objects.
Still, things are changing. Lots of major museums, including the Metropolitan and Museum of Fine Arts Boston, do have extensive amounts of their collection online, and if my internship experience is any indication of the way most museums operate, the internal databases are far from complete, so the fact that the external (public, Internet available) databases aren’t representative of the full collection isn’t necessarily an indication that the museum is willfully holding back. The British Museum has a wonderful system by which one can quickly and easily receive high-quality digital images of objects in their online database, and now the Smithsonian has apparently started a Flickr account.
Somehow I am not surprised that despite the Smithsonian being one of the largest museum complexes in the world, including collections representative of the entire world, they remain excessively Americanocentric in all they do, the Flickr collection being no different. A search for “Japan” within their Flickr album yields only one result, and that a photo taken on the National Mall. Where are all the photos taken in Japan by now-famous Meiji period photographers? Where are photos of the many Worlds’ Fairs attended by Japan in the late 19th through 20th centuries? Ah, nevermind.
Of course, unlike private institutions like the Met and MFA which have some basis for their continued copyright ownership posturing, the Smithsonian is a public institution, a vast portion of its collection being officially acknowledged as being in the public domain, and yet jealously guarded nevertheless. So, this Flickr site is definitely a start.
