Sharing is Caring
The script for my TEDxHamburg talk at “Dreamers — prototyping tomorrow”
1 June 2019, Grand Laiezshalle, Hamburg
Last year in the autumn, I was called up by a friend. She had just watched the first episode of the new Netflix series Alias Grace — based on Margaret Atwood’s novel. In the scenography, she had recognised a bunch of Danish artworks, all stemming from the collection of SMK, the national gallery of Denmark. The museum’s high resolution images had been printed and fitted in heavy gilded frames to look like authentic old masterpieces.
How had paintings from a tiny country like Denmark wound up in a Netflix series taking place in Canada? The short answer is: Open licensing. Since 2012, SMK has shared high resolution images of artworks in the collection for free with no restrictions whatsoever. Somehow, the Netflix people had come across this free resource and used it for the scenography.
My initial reaction was awe. It works! When we set art free, people out there find ways to use it way beyond our wildest imagination. The next day, a journalist from a national newspaper called me up. He knew about our open policy. He wanted to know if we seriously thought it was ok for a commercial giant like Netflix to use our collection without seeking permission and without paying a fee? Wasn’t that a missed opportunity? To his surprise, I replied it was in accordance with our open licensing policy. We want to lose control.
Is that a way to run a museum? Is it the right context for Danish artworks to pop up in? Shouldn’t a big player like Netflix pay for using the images? They certainly could afford it. As an art historian and museum professional, I’ve been brought up to believe that I’m a gatekeeper. Especially when it comes to commercial reuse of art collections. But through working with opening up the SMK collection, I have come to trust in the public domain. In the concept of the Commons. And that entails loss of control.
What exactly happens when artworks go from being physical objects in a museum gallery or in a storage room to a digital object online? And what’s the concept of the public domain?
A key obligation for the museum is to keep a registry of our collection. Each artwork should have an individual record in our database, with information about who created it, when, what it’s made of, when it was acquired etc. accompanied by an image of the object. An invaluable tool for museum professionals for their research and curatorial work. With a collection of a quarter of a million artworks, like we have at SMK, you need a system to find your way around. But it’s when we put the data online that its potential explodes. Then it becomes a highly useful resource for people outside museum circles — think of teachers looking for learning materials or designers looking for new inspiration.
The thing is, traditionally museums have kept their data and images locked up, away from the general public. That goes for SMK too. We’ve been acting as gatekeepers of our collections, controlling who used them and for what purposes. But the majority of our collection is so old that all copyright has expired. That happens 70 years after the artist passed away. That’s when the artworks go into the public domain: it’s the sum of human intellectual and creative efforts, which we all have not only permission, but the right to use.
In that perspective, it’s really not up to the museum to control how images of public domain artworks are used. Copyright is a temporary exception to the public domain. As Dutch lawyer Paul Torremans has said, copyright is “a little coral reef of private right jutting up from the ocean of Public Domain.” There’s incredible potential in liberating the parts of our heritage that’s in the public domain.
There’s a realisation of how the internet works at play too. We can never survey the entire reuse of our collections anyway. And the thing is, if a small museum like SMK had kept a paywall, chances are Netflix would have never noticed them. It’s only because we keep an open image policy that they discovered and reused our artworks among millions of other artworks.
For a number of years, I’ve lived and worked by the words: Sharing is caring. What do I mean by that?
To share digitised cultural heritage is a palpable way to care about it. When shared freely as digital copies, cultural heritage dramatically increases its use value. It allows people to grab and touch, remix and make their own artworks that are normally behind safety glass and restrictive distances. They are invited to define and shape how and where cultural heritage objects and information can be used.
By opening up and sharing our digital resources, we safeguard their relevance and value. When artworks are distant treasures on a wall, however precious they may be, many people feel disconnected. But when you’re able to get close to and touch it, when you can make it your own, you instinctively feel it belongs to you, and that which you own you will care about.
Sharing is Caring is the name of a conference I started in 2011. It’s the title of a book I published in 2014. But it’s more than a conference and a book. It’s a movement and a mindset. Cultural heritage and museums can feel alien. But opening up can be a key to change. Hear what students said after taking part in a workshop where they could remix public domain art from SMK:
”It’s strange in a way, because those old artworks have always felt like they were sacred almost (…) It’s like art changes character when you can touch it with your own hands. You’re able to look at it up close. It means a lot to be able to hold the art between your hands and touch it.”
That’s just one anecdote. Think about the impact you can have if you make sure thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people have access to digitally grab and use those old artworks. That’s what’s happening on Wikipedia since we opened up our collection.
Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia, which means all of its content is based on openly licensed material, and that we all are allowed to reuse everything we find on Wikipedia. It’s a knowledge tank and a resource. Therefore, its volunteer editors around the globe need open content to illustrate and enrich the knowledge they share on the platform. The web is overflowing with inferior reproductions of artworks, and often Wikipedians have to settle for these because the good reproductions are residing behind restrictive image policies and paywalls. The result is that one of the absolute top websites of the world — where we all look for information about anything — is not always backed up with absolute top images.
In my eyes, that’s a missed opportunity. Museums around the globe, the finest of them, have been digitising their collections for years. But they keep them behind bars, keep them to themselves, wanting to control who uses them and how they are used. I know museums need to make a revenue. But in a reality where the web is overflowing with free images, the business of selling digital reproductions of artworks faces serious competition.
I also know museums need to fight to stay relevant in a reality where competition doesn’t come from other museums or classical cultural institutions. It comes from Youtube and Netflix and other online media grabbing people’s attention. How can museums play a role in the attention economy of the internet? That’s a big question which calls for a comprehensive investigation. But the key message I want you to go away with today is that one of the answers is to open up.
Opening up means entering the flow of the web. It means letting go of control. But it also means that your art collection will be discovered and enjoyed and used by a heck of a lot more than the usual suspects who always go to museums. Because it allows your images to become part of the ecosystem of the web. If your images are used in Wikipedia articles, they will rank high in google searches, because Google favours websites that attract a lot of traffic. Last year, we tracked more than 35 million page views of SMK images on Wikipedia. We could never hope to have that kind of traffic on our own website, let alone in our physical museum.
What’s a pageview worth, you might ask? Is it as significant as going to the museum and seeing the original artwork? The classic approach has it that the physical experience always wins. It’s richer, more authentic. And maybe to me personally, being an avid museum lover, that’s true. However, people are different. They have different interests and preferences. Not everyone loves going to the museum, but artworks can be meaningful and interesting in other forms — for instance in classrooms and newsmedia. And even if everybody wanted to go to SMK, there are many, many people in the world who will never have the opportunity to do so. SMK has 300,000 visitors per year. There are 7 billion citizens in the world. That’s a lot of people we will never welcome in our museum. However, 3 billion are on the internet. With our open online collection, we can potentially reach them and give them meaningful art experiences.
That’s why, when we found out that SMK artworks were being used in the scenography of Alias Grace on Netflix, we went and added detailed information about those artworks to the Wikipedia article about the tv series. Because Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia where everyone looks up information every day, we believe that being present there is the best way to help people discover the treasures we hold in our collection.
Very likely, it can be a first touch point with users who never heard of SMK or Danish 19th century art before.
Through our open licensing, we’re able to tell people that the artworks belong to you too, and that you are completely free to grab and use them for anything you can dream of. Your imagination is the only limit.
