With the advent and rapid development of the internet,
information has suddenly become available at the click of a button, or a touch
of a screen. We can access information at home, work or on the move. We can
comment, criticise and ‘like’ ideas and images that circulate at a rapid pace.
The unprecedented control that the public body has gained over its own
direction and presentation has proved somewhat of a problem for major
institutions, who traditionally held the reins of power in regards to how ideas
and particularly images were disseminated into the public domain. Copyright
laws, so tightly entangled in ideas of ownership and restrictions, now seem
incongruent with the modern world in which everything you would ever need to
know is obtainable via the internet.
Exciting steps are being made however, with institutions moving
towards making their catalogues more accessible to the public. This is in
keeping with the general move away from the institution as an elitist
organisation. The museum and art gallery are now required to make themselves
portals of information open to all. They must provide a public service that is accountable
to the taxpayers needs. The Public Catalogue Foundation, working alongside the
BBC and its ‘Your Paintings’ initiative hopes to create a comprehensive online
catalogue of the 200,000 paintings that are in what are considered to be
‘public institutions’. These refer to museums, government offices, public
libraries and council buildings. Due to a lack of space, as many as four out of
five paintings in public institutions are not on display to the public, and
many will have never been photographed before this ambitious project. Since the
site launched earlier this year, it has already uploaded an impressive 145,000 oil
paintings, and so is over half way to its target. It aims to have another
21,000 uploaded in the next few months.
‘Your Paintings’ is a classic example of how the twenty
first century can engage the public with its artistic heritage. By using media
that most people today are more than familiar with, it seeks to make art and
history relate to the public, and even make it ‘trendy’. On the site you can
‘tag’ paintings, where you are asked to indicate things, names, places, events
and subjects that spring to mind when you look at each particular image. In
this way the site is asking for the public’s help in organising this colossal
archive into some kind of scheme, as with each tag the paintings are
classified. Encouraging the viewer to look at these paintings more closely, it
also makes the catalogue inherently interactive, more of a dialogue between the
public and the institution. You can also tweet about the site, post it on
Facebook, send paintings to your friends. You can even develop your own ‘My
Paintings’ page where you can add and delete paintings to your own private
collection.
The Public Foundation Catalogue has inspired a myriad of
other organisations to attempt the publicisation of entire catalogues online.
The Getty Research Portal is just one of many, as well as the Poissin
Conoisseurship Project run by Dr. David Packwood. In the future, it is not
inconceivable that all art works in all countries could be assessed via various
forms of online media. This would of course include the wider circulation of
many lesser-known works, and the increased publicisation of less visited art
galleries and museums. This project also marks the advent of institutions
working together in a collaborative effort to provide an arts service to the
public domain.
At the earliest, the ‘Your Paintings’ site should be
finished by late 2012. The completion of this project could mark a juncture
where access to image information is no longer restricted to the academic
elite. No longer will you need a back stage, VIP pass to gain access to the
full extent of the artistic pedigree held in public institutions. Comprehensive
and even exhaustive scholarship will now be possible. With this project, the
nations’ oil paintings really do become ‘Your Paintings’.
Link to the 'Your Paintings' site http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/
