Art for the Masses-The Public Catalogue Foundation

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/