Can a Museum Stop You From Using Photos of Really Old Art
©2013 REBECCA ROBERTSON
It's a scene that plays itself out hundreds of times a day in American museums: a mother and her fidgety teenage daughter stand before a famous painting—in this case, Caravaggio's The Toothpuller, from the early 17th century. The mom pulls out a cell phone and poses her daughter in front of the work, a funny-grotesque prototype of a smirking dentist performing an extraction. As she frames the shot, a guard steps forward. "No photos," he says. The woman apologizes. She and her girl slip out of the room and go along on to the side by side gallery.
This particular episode took place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), at a traveling exhibition devoted to Caravaggio's influence on European painting. But it could have happened anywhere. We're in an age when people take pictures merely about everywhere, an act that photography critic Jörg M. Colberg describes equally "compulsive looking." The phenomenon has created a unique set of challenges for art museums, many of which have historically had strict limitations on photography—either for the purpose of protecting light-sensitive works or because of copyright issues.
Merely the ubiquity of digital cameras, forth with the irrepressible urge to take pictures, has led many museums to revise their policies in contempo years. Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Getty Museum—to proper name a few—all allow photography in some or all of their permanent-drove spaces.
"Y'all are fighting an uphill battle if you restrict," says Nina Simon, director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and author of The Participatory Museum. "Even in the most locked-downward spaces, people will however have pictures and you'll still find a million of these images online. Then why not support it in an open style that's constructive and embraces the public?"
Certainly, in that location are applied reasons for doing so. No-photograph policies can exist difficult to enforce. "Guards are spending so much time focusing on someone holding a device that they might non see the person next to them touching the fine art," says Alisa Martin, senior manager of brand management and company services at the Brooklyn Museum, an establishment that has allowed photography in the majority of its galleries for roughly half a dozen years. "As the devices go smaller, it gets harder to manage. We have to ask ourselves, are nosotros using our guards appropriately?"
Social media besides complicates the issue. This past January, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project reported that 97 percent of the more than than ane,200 arts organizations it polled had a presence on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. New York's Museum of Modern Fine art, for instance, posts photos of artworks and installation processes on Facebook (where it has around one.3 million followers), the Massachusetts Museum of Gimmicky Art has photos of its Sol LeWitt wall drawings on Instagram, and diverse other institutions—from the San Francisco Museum of Mod Art to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo—tin can be found on the picture-sharing and blogging service Tumblr. Moreover, places like the Brooklyn Museum and LACMA accept loftier-resolution images from their collections available for free on their websites.
With museums sharing so much imagery themselves, it can exist difficult for visitors to understand that they can't necessarily do the same. "If a museum is actually active on social media, they're putting forward the idea that they stand for a venue that is all about being conversational," says Simon. "For the company, it can be disturbing to and then become to the concrete space and be confronted with a policy that isn't." (For the record, both MoMA and MASS MoCA allow photography in nigh of their spaces. And while at that place'southward no manner to quantify which artwork gets the about photographic attention, a staff member at MoMA suspects it'south Vincent van Gogh'due south 1889 painting Starry Dark for that museum.)
The biggest hurdle to broad-open photo policies is the issue of copyright. Museums often do non concord the copyrights to the works they display, which creates legal problems when visitors start snapping away. According to Julie Ahrens, a lawyer who specializes in issues of copyright and fair use at the Center for Net and Social club at Stanford University, a photograph of an artwork could be considered a "derivative piece of work," which is "potentially a violation of the copyright holder." Simply the deluge of cameras, along with the fact that the vast bulk of visitors simply want to snap a pic for a Facebook album, has led some institutions—such as MoMA, the Indianapolis Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum—to ask lenders for permission to shoot, with the stipulation that pictures are for noncommercial use.
"There'due south an undeniable benefit to having visitors tweet about their visit or share photos," says Brooke Fruchtman, associate vice president of public engagement at LACMA. "Nosotros've had bully success with our Stanley Kubrick exhibition because people could take pictures of anything." For more than a year, the museum has allowed photography in its permanent-drove galleries. Withal, for temporary shows, permission ultimately rests in the hands of the lender, every bit in the case of Caravaggio's Toothpuller, which is owned by the Galleria Palatina at the Pallazzo Pitti in Florence.
Naturally, there are museumgoers who will occasionally intermission the rules: a company to the Indianapolis Museum recently took pictures all over the building—including galleries that were off limits to photography—and then offered them for sale online. "We had to intervene," says Anne Young, who oversees rights and reproduction for the museum. This type of behavior, however, is an farthermost exception.
For years, advocates of open-source civilization and a growing chorus of fine art bloggers accept lobbied for less restrictive photograph policies on the grounds that our shared artistic legacy is intended to exist, well, shared. Non to mention that there is no small irony in existence forbidden to have pictures in cultural establishments that celebrate the work of artists like Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, figures whose work is based, to a large degree, on the photographs of others.
As a culture, we increasingly communicate in images. Twenty years ago, a museumgoer might accept discussed an interesting work of fine art with friends over dinner. Today, that person is more than probable to have a movie of it and upload it to Facebook—such as New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz, who, earlier this year, posted a photo of himself hamming information technology upwards in front of a Marcel Duchamp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Or perchance that museumgoer might remix his or her photo with other visual elements and transform it into something new. Every day, users on image-sharing sites such every bit Tumblr create their own diptychs, collages, and themed galleries devoted to everything from ugly Renaissance babies to Brutalist architecture.
This transformation in the mode in which people assimilate visual stimuli—not to mention the rest of the globe around them—is something that Harvard theoretician Lawrence Lessig has described as a shift from "read-but" civilization (in which a passive viewer looks upon a work of art) to "read-write" culture (in which the viewer actively participates in a recreation of it). The first step toward recreating a work of art, for most people, is to photo it, which, ultimately, isn't all that dissimilar from the time-honored tradition of sketching.
Carolina A. Miranda is an independent journalist based in Los Angeles. She blogs at C-Monster.net.
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Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/photography-in-art-museums-2222/
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