What the divergent attitudes towards open access reveal about many in the museum world (particularly in Italy)
It’s always difficult to predict when dramatic, wholesale changes in public attitudes will occur. Had you asked me back in 2009, when the beautifully-constructed Acropolis Museum in Athens just opened, what would be more likely to happen: the repatriation of Lord Elgin’s stolen Parthenon frieze to its rightful home or the widespread legalization of marijuana throughout the United States, I would have naturally assumed that you were joking.
And I would have been completely wrong: 15 years later, the “Elgin Marbles” are still proudly on display as the British Museum’s most celebrated case of colonial theft (unless, of course, some of them have quietly managed to make their way to eBay), while Wikipedia now informs me that 38/50 American states have legalized cannabis for medical purposes and 24/50 for recreational use. You just never can tell how the future is going to unfold.
But one reasonably good indicator that wholesale change is underway is when large numbers of cracks spontaneously begin to appear in the old order. Which is exactly what’s happening right now with the issue of copyright of photographs of celebrated works of art.
Anyone keen to use such images, as I am, is now faced with a veritable Wild West of truly global proportions, with museum policy across the world varying from unequivocal open access to militant, government-sponsored cultural protectionism.
While I hardly claim to know all the historical details here, my sense is that the primary pioneering force behind this growing transformation came from Wikimedia Commons. Launched in 2004, Wikimedia Commons’ impressive artistic collection effectively began with Directmedia’s donation of 10,000 high-quality photographs from the Yorck Project in 2005, before being enthusiastically buttressed by countless enthusiastic contributors from around the world, led by Francesco Bini, the remarkable one-man artistic photographic machine who goes by the name of “Sailko” (see here), who serves as palpable proof of the unsurprising fact that, once you go beyond their criminally short-sighted, jingoistic institutions, Italians can be just as impressively forward-thinking global citizens as anyone else.
The first major bricks and mortar institution to boldly follow Wikimedia Commons’ impressive lead was Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which launched their transformative Open Data policy in 2013, forthrightly providing high-quality digital images, metadata and bibliographic information on their extensive collection without any restrictions on reuse.
The Rijkmuseum’s enlightened attitude then rippled across the Atlantic in 2017, with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiling their own comprehensive Open Access policy that made all their carefully documented photographs of their artworks (some 492,000 images) freely available to all, no questions asked.
The Met’s Netherlandishly-inspired approach was passionately driven by their then-director Thomas Campell, an expert on European tapestries (and thus delightfully nicknamed “Tapestry Tom”), whose modernizing attitude appears to have caused sufficient internal friction at the museum (see here, for example) to have driven him to the other side of the country, where he now runs the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. By that point, however, the open access revolution was well and truly gaining momentum, with Washington’s National Gallery of Art announcing their own similar, highly impactful, Open Access Policy in 2021.
But for every reasonable, right-thinking museum keen to display its cultural wares to the world at large in the best possible light (and there are many), at the moment there seem to be, unfortunately, almost equally many that take a very different, commercial, proprietary approach: from forcing would-be downloaders to officially declare their not-for-profit intentions to, at worst, forming aggressive partnerships with shady corporate extortionists (Getty, Bridgeman, Alamy, etc.) in the hopes of callously extracting as much money as possible from global art lovers (Yes, I’m still looking at you, Italian museums).
Eventually, of course, they will all lose. There is no conceivable defense—either legally or morally—for a museum to insist that it owns the right to a photograph of one of its artworks.
On the legal side: copyrights belong, properly, to an author of a work (I could have sworn I’ve said this somewhere before); and the artworks in question were all created many years—indeed, typically many centuries—after their copyrights comprehensively expired. And to declare that a simple photograph of a painting is in itself a work of art deserving of copyright protection is simply ridiculous in an age when everyone carries around the necessary tool for producing such a facsimile in their pocket.
But beyond the obviously spurious legal arguments that some institutions are grasping to invoke in a desperate effort to maintain ownership over the images of their artworks (the Italian government, it must be added, has gone even further and vigorously enacted its own uniquely ridiculous legislation in an attempt to explicitly procure such ownership, seemingly indefinitely), lies an even more troubling moral issue that naturally calls into question the whole point of a museum in the first place.
Because museums exist for a reason; and that reason most definitely isn’t to further the financial and nationalistic political agendas of their current administrative masters (Have I mentioned Italy?).
It is not a matter of national identity or “patrimony”—its more sophisticated but equally dubious evil twin—but rather an opportunity to celebrate our most prized human achievements. Just because Raphael, say, happened to have been born in Urbino, doesn’t make his works any less meaningful or inspiring to people currently living in Ulan Bator or Uganda or Uruguay, any more than the paintings lining the walls of the grotte de Lascaux should be viewed as “exclusively French”. And most people on the planet who would be thrilled at the prospect of looking at a Raphael will never have the chance to see one in person.
The point of museums is to safeguard and display our most magnificent human accomplishments so that they can continue to be enjoyed by everyone interested in them today and anyone who might be in the future. Period.
By far the biggest cultural issue of our age is not who officially owns what. It’s that not nearly enough people are aware of, and excited by, what has already been created.
And if our museums aren’t going to kindle that enthusiasm, then who will?
Howard Burton, September 9, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and the creator of several documentary films, including Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024), Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) and more in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
