This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall):
- Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic.
- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything.
- The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder.
The conclusions:
- Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators)
The second-order effects:
- Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
- More people get to see fine art
- Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
The basement of the Rijks Museum is nothing short of incredible. There is so much precious art there that I don't even want to think about what damage a fire could do. There are so many works that that had not seen the light of day in 50 years or more that they had serious storage issues, never mind cataloguing what they actually had. I've been in there twice, once to look at a painting that had been damaged to help analyze the paint with a for the time very high tech chromatograph, once on invitation of the guy that ran the place.
Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.
I'm a bit of a philistine so please don't take this as more than cheap provocation, but would Rijks Museum basement burning down to cinders be such a loss if no one sees the collection anyway? Is art that's filed away (even for good reasons like future restorability) for lifetimes that precious?
I attended art school at a large museum, and the best part was getting access to the "basement" (they have an actual term for the archive, I just can't remember it).
There's so much art that, simply for the sake of limited display space (as well as other things), can't get shown in the museum. Digitizing efforts like this are fantastic.
Me and the wiff visited the Rijks in late 2019. There is rather more than two paintings to see and the ship models were quite fun. We thoroughly enjoyed it. We spent a good five hours there and will return some day.
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters!
This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands.
> More people get to see fine art
until it's all been sold.
> Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money.
This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.
Why don't you take some time to listen to the podcast before getting angry about the market or someone else's privilege?
Also, maybe you missed the part where there is 10x-100x the amount of art sitting in the archive than on display? Bringing lots of new supply of art onto the market would necessarily lower prices. This would make it less profitable to buy up art privately in the hope that it appreciates. It would also make it more affordable for other museums.
At the same time, there's nothing preventing a first-tier museum from only selling to other museums rather than to private collectors. They might even stipulate terms of the sale that the art must stay with the new owner for a minimum time frame.
A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused.
A museum preserves cultural heritage.
The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years.
Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now.
So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage.
Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
"- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything."
Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time.
This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.
FWIW this also exists in the Netherlands, it's very handy when I have visitors as I can go along to most of the places they go without having to pay, or just when I have an afternoon free and want to go do something.
In the USSR central museums (think The Hermitage or The Pushkin Museum) would distribute a lot of art from their archives to regional museums, even to museums in small villages. So you wouldn't be surprised to see good quality art (sometimes by famous artists) even in small towns.
This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
Funny, an MP in my country suggested this some time ago, lend or donate art pieces to the former colonies. Cue the reactions calling her an "unpatriotic traitor".
Perhaps one should also consider changing the way we look at art. Is it a good thing that it is privatised? The legacy and heritage of past generations should by rights belong to all.
Reminds me of the time that I read in a book about the Louvre it would take 3 days to see it all. So I booked for 3 days and it’s true : together with the book it took me exactly three days.
It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.
I'd probably still hit overload even if I had 3 days to devote to seeing the Louvre. I find I can handle 3 or 4 hours of a museum and I have to get out and do something else.
Of course, it really helps if you've been to a place before and will probably go back again. When I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I basically have a mental plan for what I'm going to see.
A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. At a time when I was visiting NYC frequently and MOMA had just reopened after a major renovation and tickets were hard to get, I bought a membership. It was really nice to be able to pop in for an hour when I was in town and see some things I especially liked.
To a certain degree, it's not impossible that museums are either competent enough to recognise talented artists early, or so powerful that their buying itself is the signal that makes an artist.
Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit?
There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old.
Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
In the Netherlands many of the musea are semi public, and especially the Rijks get a lot of tax money and also a lot of donations. The Rijksmusem is actually the national museum, Rijk is another word for State or maybe closer to empire. It's entire collection is the heritage of the Dutch state. So in this case it's not a bad argument to make that it shouldn't be hidden in a basement but shared with the public. Although since the nineties the Rijks is officially an independent foundation.
That's an interesting remark indeed. Though I do see some differences that might explain it. For example, the cinemas and museums differ vastly on the medium they serve. A copy of a painting bears little value.
A singer is unique in its persona for the live ecperience but can serve a large crowd in one sitting, saturating the market. Whereas a painting can only be viewed by a small crowd at any single time, given you want to see the original and not a display. So it will take ages to extract value when based on a reasonable ticket price. This stands in contrast with the prices often paid for high profile pieces, giving reason to subsidized content. Which in general is best served to a non profit.
Or to put it more bluntly, art is an archaic medium of entertainment that has little chance of survival against modern media and society wishes to keep it.
Or on the other hand, it seems that the real crime is that you have to pay to see the movies. Art and entertainment are both the shared inheritance of all humans, and all humans have the inherent right to freely and indefinitely enjoy them.
Occasionally. Or at least run in a "only making the bills because they are supported by donations and public funds" fashion similar to many museums and other arts things.
Or issue one-week tickets. I've been to a couple of places that do that - amazing if you have kids and they go off on one (ie have a bad day/meltdown), you can leave and not lose out.
Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too.
It makes me wonder; why not build a massive multi-story museum complex with the wall space to show all of them. Make it more like a library than a museum.
I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.
I remember listening to this episode! I often actually disagree with the host fairly often, but find him worth listening to. I think it doesn't happen because other art museums will refuse to loan works of art to you on visiting exhibits if you sell any of your artwork. The Baltimore Museum of Art (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-ar...) faced a huge backlash when they decided to sell art. Being in the DC area, I do find that I use museums differently when they are free. I can just stop in to see a single exhibit.
Isn't that the case in all of the UK? I never paid for a museum in England either anyway (other than voluntary donations). In New Zealand it's free too.
In the Netherlands it's pretty expensive, but a number of museums have a "free day" once a month.
My biggest problem is actually not so much the price, but rather the opening times, which tend to be during office hours: when people are working. I would love it if more museums would be open until 21:00 or 22:00.
People in the UK should know that the Tate Gallery, being a publicly-funded museum, are required to make any items in their collection available for you to see on request. When studying sculpture I was really interested in a 1972 piece by Marcel Broothaers called Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus and noticed that the Tate had it in their collection. I emailed them and set up a time to visit a warehouse in SE London, and they brought it out for me to look at it. It's so much better than seeing things in a packed gallery, let alone a packed Tate, and you get a real sense of what the work is like in the flesh, stripped of all the spectacle and didactic trash that generally surrounds works in somewhere like the Tate.
Yes, it can be personal study. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution. Perhaps if you're asking to look at a Monet they might want a bit more information (Marcel Broodthaers isn't exactly a household name!), but if your hobby is painting and you want to study the brushstrokes I don't think they'd be able to turn you down - the whole point of these institutions is that they're paid for by the state, and by extension the taxes of its citizens.
I don’t know about museums but I do know that many public bodies in the UK will take enquiries from any member of the public, and will not automatically turn down requests - although such requests may go to the bottom of the priority queue if there are other requests of greater public interest.
Is it just me, or is this site not retina/high DPI-aware? All the images look kind of blurry to me.
Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality.
It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
If you're talking about thumbnails, I think they made the right choice. Just the top part of the homepage already contains 5MB of image assets. Scrolling down a few times quickly ups that to 15MB and more. I'd rather have reasonably sized and optimized images throughout the site - with high resolutions ones as downloads - and a very speedy browsing experience, then the other way around.
However, I would expect the online tiled image viewer to show the full, high quality image - at least, when zoomed in.
Yeah, I think the default view on the page is of average quality. Not sure why, but it seems to be a completely intentional choice. I think to download high-dpi they want you to register an account. /shrug
I've seen this kind of thing from other museums too.
Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images?
The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.
The Rijksmuseum will let you order prints on canvas for what seems like a reasonable price to me:
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still...
If you hover the 'Scissors' icon in the lower right while viewing a work of art, you can choose 'Order' and then you have some choices of crop, orientation, poster or canvas etc.
I've used Shutterfly to order canvas prints. It's still ink and not oil paints, but it is on canvas. The result isn't glossy like a photo print, but it also doesn't show brushstrokes like a real oil painting, although I guess you would still see some if you sent a picture of an oil painting. They love sending out coupons that make it reasonably affordable. The canvas comes mounted on an internal wooden frame.
You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.
Are these downloadable? Just clicking through didn't seem to have any download links available.
For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually.
Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.
yeah, there's a scissor icon when viewing an artwork and clicking that will give you an option to download (you'll need an account created first). Also, give it like a good 3 seconds after you click it, I noticed it took a while to start the download :/
You can almost always find the file in browser's developer tools (the network tab). Screenshots are terrible for this purpose because you end up with either huge PNGs of JPEGs, or JPEGs with an extra layer of compression artefacts.
Oh the engage in a lot of trickery including chopping the image up into bits and loading it as part of a thousand different <img> tags. More pain than it's worth.
It's always fantastic to see these get released into the public domain. I am not someone who is trained to appreciate art, but I find it relaxing to take a break from coding to look at landscape paintings from time to time.
I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.
Does anyone know of an "awesome" list of such resources? I've seen dozens of such announcements, but I never really have the time to explore and wish they were collected somewhere so that I could look later.
Readit News
This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall):
- Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic.
- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything.
- The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder.
The conclusions:
- Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators)
The second-order effects:
- Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
- More people get to see fine art
- Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
I think it's worth a listen.
[0]: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/
Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.
There's so much art that, simply for the sake of limited display space (as well as other things), can't get shown in the museum. Digitizing efforts like this are fantastic.
Night Watch and...? Girl With a Pearl Earring? The Hare?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters!
This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands.
> More people get to see fine art
until it's all been sold.
> Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money.
This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.
Also, maybe you missed the part where there is 10x-100x the amount of art sitting in the archive than on display? Bringing lots of new supply of art onto the market would necessarily lower prices. This would make it less profitable to buy up art privately in the hope that it appreciates. It would also make it more affordable for other museums.
At the same time, there's nothing preventing a first-tier museum from only selling to other museums rather than to private collectors. They might even stipulate terms of the sale that the art must stay with the new owner for a minimum time frame.
A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused.
A museum preserves cultural heritage.
The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years.
Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now.
So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage.
Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time.
This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.
This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
Museums are free in the UK (apart from special events). They are funded by the state.
Pretty much any publicly funded gallery has free admission.
It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.
Of course, it really helps if you've been to a place before and will probably go back again. When I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I basically have a mental plan for what I'm going to see.
A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. At a time when I was visiting NYC frequently and MOMA had just reopened after a major renovation and tickets were hard to get, I bought a membership. It was really nice to be able to pop in for an hour when I was in town and see some things I especially liked.
Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit?
There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old.
Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
Or to put it more bluntly, art is an archaic medium of entertainment that has little chance of survival against modern media and society wishes to keep it.
Yes? I regularly attend showings at a non-profit cine-club.
Many museums are education oriented rather than entertainment oriented anyways. There is a reason school busses are constantly distorting students.
Occasionally. Or at least run in a "only making the bills because they are supported by donations and public funds" fashion similar to many museums and other arts things.
This works really well and doesn't involve selling the family silver.
Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too.
I imagine it wouldn't work for them Louvre!
In the Netherlands we have the museumkaart[0], costs are €60 per year.
Which give you unlimited access to most museums here. Resulting in a lot of people going multiple times to the same museum.
[0] https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart
I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.
In the Netherlands it's pretty expensive, but a number of museums have a "free day" once a month.
My biggest problem is actually not so much the price, but rather the opening times, which tend to be during office hours: when people are working. I would love it if more museums would be open until 21:00 or 22:00.
[0] https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/
Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality.
It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
However, I would expect the online tiled image viewer to show the full, high quality image - at least, when zoomed in.
Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images?
The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.
You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.
For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually.
Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.
I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.