I think that the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is mostly the best museum in the world. It is called an art museum, but like the British Museum or the Louvre, I think of it as a museum presenting the history of various cultures in art objects. When I think of art, I usually think of creative expression, but with the Met covering so many cultures over so many centuries, my experience of the place is more to think about what a culture was trying to express than what any individual artist was doing. For the first two years I was in New York I am sure I went to this place at least twice a month. Beyond the collection, the curation, explanatory notes, tours, and website are excellent. I still go there as much as I can. I go there more than I go to any other place in the city.
A group of Wikipedians including me attended a Thursday 21 April 2016 meetup at the Met Breuer. This branch just opened the month before in the space left behind when the Whitney Museum moved to their new location. I expected that the Met wanted a relationship with Wikipedia, but going into the meeting, I anticipated that they were interested in a chat about the basics and also that they wanted to meet the group to socialize. For the meeting they offered a tour of the new space. In itself would not be such a powerful draw, but as a group we asked more people to come to make a friendly show to the Met just because it is the Met. Wikipedians at this meeting included Michael Mandiberg, Richard Knipel, Sherry Antoine, David Goodman, Evan Amos, Mike Feist, Nate Feist, Chanitra Bishop, Jim Henderson, and Jeremy Baron, which is a super-star lineup of attendees for a chat.
this is @sree’s pic
Upon arrival someone at the door escorted everyone who came into the boardroom. Like any boardroom, this was an intimate space for about 20 people. The table was a single slab of stone about a foot thick and they had expensive snacks on the table. Typically when Wikipedians are invited anywhere the hosts put them in side rooms with tap water and maybe a bucket of coffee, but for this meeting, obviously catering set out snack and $5 bottles of water. It was a nice welcome to demonstrate that they reserved a room for respected guests and that they made a point to plan for an expense in someone’s budget. What we noticed more than anything is that all this planning meant that this chat was not someone’s side project, but rather, multiple people must have decided that Wikipedians were welcome.
In the lead up to the event there was no listing of the hosts or any particular speakers. When we got there, the hosts were Sree Sreenivasan and Thomas Campbell, which was a flattering surprise. I was expecting a communications intern. Other Met staff in the room were curators and well pressed partner relations staff. I had never heard of a more gracious welcome for Wikipedians anywhere in any context before this. Sree and Thomas were grateful that we all came, and they talked about future plans for the Met.
In various ways, they talked about how digital media was important to them. I have heard that before, and of course with Sree at the Met I expected that he was pushing Thomas as much as he allowed himself to be pushed. What surprised me was that as the conversation went forward, I realized that the provocative ideas were coming from Thomas more than Sree, and that Sree was giving him space to speak. There came a point in the conversation when Thomas said that he imagined that the Met’s organization team gave a comparable level of attention and development to all the Met’s venues, then he listed off the 5th Avenue location, the Cloisters, this location on Madison Avenue, and the website. I stopped him while he was talking and asked him how he felt about the website. He replied directly enough to leave no room for misunderstanding. He said that the website was as important as giving people access to the physical museums. That included the 5th Avenue museum which is a research center and everything else. He said that guests to the Met’s website are just as important as visitors to the museum because they are just as eager to use the Met’s holdings, information, and curated content.
I was shocked. This is exactly what any Wikipedian wants to hear from a museum, and yet so many museums have little regard or much nice to say about their online visitors. Mostly museums present a website as a vehicle to recruit people to visit in person. I have never before heard of a museum which said that serving guests online is as important as serving them in person. Practically all museums spend much more money on their physical location as compared to their websites. Of course investment needs to go toward making their holdings presentable, but beyond that, it is the norm for museums to favor in person attendees. Museums typically want “footfall”, or increased counts of people coming to the museum. The website is imagined to be something which competes with that. The Met’s position seemed very aligned with Wikipedia values.
In 2013 I was fortunate to visit the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka. Dhaka is a huge city and this was a nice museum with a great collection showcasing the local culture. On an upper floor of the museum, though, was an exhibit to present arts of different cultures. The idea was that anyone might be coming to this museum to learn about cultural differences, and so they needed representative examples to have conversations about different art traditions. Bangladesh is currently going through a rough time economically, and they have limited budget. It is actually a financially poor country, with Dhaka being relatively wealthy but still a place with significant poverty. In a way comparable to how the Met has its collections arranged as European art, and Chinese art, and galleries of the Middle East and so on, this museum in Dhaka had a gallery of tourist posters from various major museums around the world. These posters were on the wall spaced and treated in the same way that better funded museums would hang their paintings. Any art class could visit the museum and view these images if they like, and reflect on these reproductions to get a close enough approximation of the original work. I bring this up because I have never seen any museum do such a thing. It is unthinkable for me that a museum like the Met, for example, would ever order tourist posters from major museums around the world then invite its guests to learn about the art displayed. The Met has a huge amount of money though, and not all museums have that luxury. Most geographic regions which have demand for a museum are not served by a gallery of any kind because of the immense cost in establishing one and keeping it relevant.
I regret the injustice that so many museums which have enough money to reasonably operate have an improbable fantasy of monetizing prints or derivative works of their public domain collection, when any museum’s collection is so meager compared our shared global heritage. When museums restrict access to high quality digital copies of physical objects which they hold but which are in the public domain, then that lessens the international access to these works that all people in the world have a right to use and enjoy. I do not believe that any museum anywhere actually gets a return on licensing their public domain content, even though they all talk about doing so and use that as a rationale for not sharing digital copies with the Wikimedia community or anyone else. There is a theory among Wikipedians that all museums lie about the success of their licensing programs, telling other museums that they are making money when actually none of them do. No museum openly reports its revenue from such programs. What money there is in gatekeeping the public away from digital copies of public domain works, the effect of restricting access means that museums like one in Dhaka which has an audience for reproductions will find themselves compromised by the selfish practices of museums who claim ownership and control of the public domain. I think that if any gallery anywhere in the world would like to produce prints of public domain works and curate art in their own show, then they should feel encouraged to do so.
Since coming to NYC in 2012 I have been bewildered by the excessive pretentiousness of the the commercial fine art scene here. It imagines that exclusive access to particular artworks is something to desire and restrict at great cost. While I want artists to be financially supported, and I think that artists need professional compensation for their work, I do not think that the art sector as an industry respects artists more than art brokers. I also think that it generates disparaging concepts about sharing art, reproducing art, including the public in art, and presenting free art. The museum sector has a long relationship with the fine art industry. That is all right, and I understand the history. But going forward, we are coming to an age when 2D art is becoming easy to replicate on paper, and 3D art is getting easier to print also. Right now, it is taboo to respectfully suggest that viewing high quality reproductions of an artwork is comparable to viewing the real thing. The Victoria and Albert Museum has its Cast Courts, but those copies are from another era that made single duplicates at great cost. The museum of the future might be more like the Bangladesh National Museum, in which a docent can present replicas of pieces from any museum and guests can appreciate the art in the context of it being a treasure for all humans instead of it being the exclusive holding of a single organization or individual. It never will be possible for all the local residents of Dhaka to visit the Met, but there could be a program for the art of the Met to appear in prints or on video screens or in any other form at any gallery, anywhere in the world, for a manageable cost.
I said at the beginning that the Met was mostly the best museum in the world. I will credit the Met for being extremely brave for expressing its commitment to its own website, and also by extension some kind of commitment for outreach to Wikipedia. No other museum has ever done such a thing for Wikipedia. However, I will also challenge the Met for cowardice, and ask it to answer its own fears. I understand that the Met will be encouraging all kinds of people to visit its website. However, the real best museum in the world is the National Museum of Bangladesh, because that museum was the first to take the logical and practical step of buying tourist posters of various famous artworks from various museums in the world and hanging them in its international gallery. To study art, there are some works and styles which are so important that every art student should be able to see them to begin conversation on a common ground with other people discussing art, and any museum who cannot purchase an original old master should feel comfortable displaying a life size print. The National Museum of Bangladesh does this so that puts it at the forefront of the digital revolution. The cowardice which is still in the heart of the Met is that the Met has not yet held an exhibition of the cheapest possible reproductions in its galleries. The museum of the future and of global experience is one that anyone can visit in their own neighborhood and gain some understanding of art held at any other location anywhere. If the Met ever has such an exhibition, then I think they would be setting an excellent example for all current museums. Anyone who has access to a public room of any size anywhere who wishes to respectably host an art showing of any works from any museum should get as much respect and appreciation as the worthy exhibit in Dhaka.