While crowds mill about the rooms of robotic art and digital extravagance at ISEA '97, they're just the ones who were lucky enough to make it to Chicago. Museum curators know the difficult truth: Art, in many ways, is unfortunately and irrevocably local.
In the effort to expand the reach - if not the ambiance - of America's museums, the Art Museum Image Consortium is bringing together curators from 25 major museums to fashion the first online uber-museum - a collection of some 100,000 digital images (with contextual info like artist's biography, interviews, and exhibition histories) to be made available to paying universities by next fall. The conference, being held today and Tuesday, is fundamentally a recognition that museums can't go into the digital revolution alone.
"Museums realized that they are not serving the education market well, and can't do it individually," says organizer Jennifer Trant at the Archive and Museum Informatics, which helps museums strategize on how to use technology. At the Chicago confab, curators from the National Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others, will address the range of questions facing an ambitious organization still in its infancy: governance, fund raising, and technical standards.
Understandably, money - in the form of licensing fees for the artwork - is at the heart of the discussions. While commercial ventures like Bill Gates' Corbis extract stiff fees from customers for reproduction, AMICO will provide open access for students and academics, with the universities picking up the tab (which has yet to be set). Trant says many museums are already uncomfortable with arrangements with Corbis, in which the institution loses control over the art reproduction and sacrifices what she calls the "artists' moral rights" - the guarantee that they will be represented in an appropriate way. "If any money is to be made, keep it inside the museum community," Trant asks.
The real beneficiaries of the AMICO network are scholars. Normally academics face a labyrinthine - and expensive - licensing process when they want to appropriate art for their publications or classes. "Every time a scholar requests [art], it costs the museum money to say 'yes,'" says Trant. Publishers of journals "have placed the burden on the authors to pay." In turn, many academics make it a sport not to pay licensing fees, Trant adds, because they can't afford it with their salaries and the fact that there are no budgets to cover it.
AMICO's project grows out of a two-year museum education project, which concluded in June. Seven universities - including Columbia, American, and the University of Illinois - were given CD-ROMs of 9,000 works from seven museums, such as National Gallery in Washington, DC; Harvard University Art Museum; and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Six of the seven universities in the program eventually developed Web resources, but the scale of the project was modest, including just images and short fields of descriptive text. "It was more experimental collaboration," says Trant. "There were no licensing fees or context for the art."
Cleveland Art Museum director Robert Bergman said the migration of the museum's collection to the Web won't threaten the existence of live (and paying) audiences. "In 1950s, when color reproduction in books became available, people said, 'No one will come to museums.' But color just whetted people's appetite," says Bergman. "The digitized image is about reality, but it's not reality. The aura of the object is irreplaceable."
The museums aren't trying to recreate themselves online; rather, they're hoping to reduce into an archival resource, says Bergman. "We're not creating an exhibition, we're creating access."
From the Wired News NY Bureau at FEED magazine.
