Black Ink

I was reading an article by BoingBoing pundit, SF author and copywonk Cory Doctorow in Make magazine the other day (I’m afraid that there’s only tiny snippet of the article available for free on-line.)

He’d visited the Greenwich Maritime Museum, full of hundred-year-old sextants, and even older devices that people used to find their way around the world before we all had satnav on our dashboards, and was struck by the “no photography” signs everywhere. Surely, he thought, most of these things cannot possibly be in copyright? Surely the museum cannot prevent others reproducing them if they so desire?

So he asked about it. No, they weren’t in copyright. No, there was nothing there likely to be damaged by a camera’s flash. The musuem just wanted to safeguard it’s postcard sales, and prevent people from taking any mementos home that they did not have to pay for.

Doctorow makes the passionate, strident, and quite correct argument that this is a complete betrayal of everything a good museum should stand for.

Copyright (ostensibly) exists to ensure that a creator is fairly recompensed in their lifetime. It exists to ensure that there is an incentive for people to produce the artifacts and technologies that shape our culture. But it runs out for a reason – because these things are too valuable to be allowed to remain in the possession of any one person or institution.

Which is of course, also the reason we have museums and art galleries. They provide places that the public can see, interact with, and be inspired by these things. They are the custodians of our culture. Doctorow’s argument is that by preventing photography, especially just because they want the money, the museums are betraying that trust in a massive and disgusting manner.

The argument, is of course, not that simple. Museums are expensive things to run – the cost of curating, preserving, and securing these objects is enormous, and most of them (in the UK, anyway) don’t charge, or don’t charge much for access. Surely there’s a reasonable argument to be made that their attempts to force cash out of people are quite justified?

Well, only up to a point, in my view. I firmly believe that you can accurate judge a culture’s level of civilization by how it treats its libraries and museums. If the museums are expensive to run, that’s not an reason to allow them to attempt to crowbar more money out of the public, that’s a reason to give them more public money.

But even aside from that argument, there is of course the possibility that the museum is simply not allowed to permit photography on certain works – that they remain in copyright, and that the museum has no choice but to disallow photography, under the terms that the owner or creator has allowed them to be exhibited under.

But on the other hand, surely it’s mostly Modern Art that this would apply to? And surely Modern Art has the least leg to stand on? Even aside from the fact that most of these works have been photographed over and over again, turning up in all sorts of media-related discussions, there’s a sizeable body of modern art that is derived from reproducing (or even simply appropriating and re-presenting) other people’s work – from Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to Duchamp’s Fountain. Surely it’s the height of hypocrisy for the owners of this body of art to attempt to prevent it’s reproduction and remixing into new forms?

Tags:   copyright · museums · photographyNo Comments