Free Association: Online Art and the Exploding Museum

By Larisa Mann, March 27, 2008

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Column: Fine art museums are challenging copyright law in the digital age.

You might not think art museums are on the front lines of battles over copyright and control of culture, but some folks in the ("fine") art world are doing exactly that. Forward-thinking museums have become labs to recombine and mash up media and take on big questions about who has rights to artistic works.

Of course, multi-media mash-ups have been happening outside museums for some time. Sites like YouTube, blogs and fan sites see users accessing, remixing, commenting, parodying, and sampling various artworks and media. They're also confronting corporate copyright law protections and legal actions. With digital music, for instance, we've witnessed legal battles, raids, corporate extortion, university crackdowns etc. But these battles have been quietly percolating in the fine art world as well.

Digital Dimensions

Digital art, from CD-ROM-based multimedia projects to internet-based-art, has challenged many social and legal assumptions about the art world. Although collage art and other visual traditions have always used reference and quotation, now galleries and artists are focusing on the ways that digital art is suited to sampling and re-mixing. Unlike other genres, digital art can easily accommodate widespread public participation. Net art collaborations in particular are driven by online interactions where "viewers" also contribute or participate in the piece.

For example, Jillian Mcdonald's Snow Stories is a kind of online engine that you, the participant, give a written story, which the engine makes into a visual experience using appropriated and original film clips, images, animation, and sound. Without your input, nothing happens. It's entertaining and beautiful, and also shakes up some assumptions about where creativity comes from — the engine is pre-set but the story comes from you.

Activism Unleashed

The potential for widespread anonymous participation has also allowed artists to blur the line between art and activism in new and interesting ways. Public Secrets, for example, was a documentary website featuring testimonials by women incarcerated in the California State Prison System. Sharon Daniels and Erik Loyer, in collaboration with human rights organization Justice Now, created a project that was able to portray the women's stories in a broader context and give viewers a different vision of the prison system. Activist art has a long history, but digital art opens up different ways to organize and share stories and reach new audiences.

Beyond the fact that these digital works break down divisions between artists and audience (also a relatively established focus for art), these projects raise specific legal questions about art and law. Since these projects are created on the internet, they invoke legal concepts of ownership. When anything is "recorded" (or written), even if the interactions occur online, our legal system assigns them rights. But copyright law is not as equipped at protecting art that fragments participation and who's meaning depends on relationships between people.

So what role do museums have in relation to digital art? Many museums find it difficult to preserve or display technology-based art (particularly web-based art). Others are taking digital art's challenges and intricacies and integrating them into the museum structure itself.

Some museums allow public access to collections online, rather than controlling access to their works (as you have to do with limited space for physical artworks). A major step in that direction happened about six years ago when a consortium of museums including the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Bancroft Library and Museum of Paleontology, Stanford University's Cantor Center for Visual Arts, UCLA's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the California Digital Library, the SFMOMA, the Japanese American National Museum and Oakland Museum of California began putting entire collections online in a searchable form.

Initiatives like these make museum collection information digitally accessible and allow more physical works to be visible online. For web-based or digital art, this could mean the entire work is available to the public in the same way that posting an mp3 makes music available.

Changing the Frame

Some museums are really pushing these possibilities. Richard Rinehart, curator of the Berkeley Art Museum's digital art collection, hopes to make the collection "open source" so that people can not only access the entire work online, but also re-generate and re-mix the artworks.

This last plan, however, raises the same questions about art that file sharing raised about music. Questions like: What rights do the artists, copyright owners, and museums have over the artwork, once it is in a collection, and what rights do the public have to access it or play with it? But museums are in a good position to take stand as these institutions still command respect in the public eye, receive some public support and are considered to serve a common good. So it's exciting to see some museums taking on the challenges of a digital age. It's especially exciting that some are making clear and specific argument about the rights of the public to access art, rather than talking about markets and industry trends.

A web-accessible and re-mixable art collection also conflicts with traditions and laws that control access to culture. For example, if an artwork is online, the flexibility of digital access means it is much easier for someone to copy, sample, or link to that artwork. That conflicts with how museums, galleries and law normally manage access to art, and is inconsistent with how copyright law has traditionally been interpreted. By supporting these works of digital art, museums affirm a new vision of interactive culture, and maybe a new interpretation of copyright law.

Museums that are taking up some of the most interesting possibilities of digital art:

The New Museum

Berkeley Art Museum

The Walker Art Center

Online repository of digital and web-based art: Rhizome's ArtBase

Larisa Mann writes about technology, media and law for WireTap, studies Jurisprudence and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley and djs under the name Ripley. She is a resident DJ at Surya Dub, San Francisco, and collaborates with the Riddim Method blog-DJ-academic crew, Havocsound sound system, and various other cross-fertilizing organisms in the Bay Area and worldwide.