Re: Fine Art Reproductions

On 99-04-22, Amalyah Keshet <akeshet[_at_]imj.org.il> wrote:
>
> On 1999-04-18, Robert Panzer <bigbusie[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Amalyah Keshet <akeshet[_at_]imj.org.il> wrote:
> > >
> > > Any museum that can raise the money opens public-access study
> > > rooms so that works in reserve can be seen and studied by
> > > interested individuals. We have three.
> >
> > I was writing about public access for the purpose of reproduction.
> > Seen and studied, yes, but would the museum allow interested
> > individuals to produce high quality photographs for reproduction?
> > Most museums in the U.S. would not. Public domain means the right
> > to reproduce the work, not to look at it.
>
> What about public domain works in private collections? Would you have
> the same expectations and make the same demands for access? How? What
> if museums finally went bankrupt, returning art works to their donors
> or selling them at auction to private collectors? There is indeed a
> problem where property rights and IP public domain overlap.

This is, in fact, a question I have mulled over for a long time. In the U.S., property and privacy rights are strong. I could make a good argument for both sides. Ultimately, the issues seem practical rather than philosophical. The solution perhaps comes through government intervention, but we all dislike this. For now, taking it one step at a time seems fine. Lets deal with the public institutions first.

> But without museums, you wouldn't have access even for looking at the
> works.

and without artists, you would not have museums. Is this really where we want to take this?

> Museums are mandated to collect, preserve, research, interpret, and
> exhibit works of art and cultural artifacts (in Israel, this is even
> expressed in the Museums Law), as I am often reminded, for the public
> good, not for private benefit. That is, while obviously we try to
> provide resources and access for viewing, learning, and just enjoying,
> there is no requirement to let private individuals use the collections
> for private gain, especially if there is any risk to the art works, or
> financial loss to the museum. The latter would be bad management, and
> derided as stupidity in any other business. Our Education Ministry is
> actually pressuring us to earn more income and support ourselves more
> independently, with better business practices. Ironically, donors are,
> as well. As "old money" philanthropic donors die away, "new money"
> donors, often business people, require the same of us. They want to
> see a "return" on their support, which they see as temporary.
 

As Tyler Ochoa says in his April 23 post:

   "Well, the public is made up of private individuals. The public good    is really nothing more than an aggregation of private interests. So    that's a difficult line to draw. But I fully agree that risk to the    art works justifies limiting access."

I think there needs to be a balance. For example (and obviously, many details need to be work-out), museums could be open an extra few hours on certain nights for individuals to go in and set up their tripods. A nominal charge could be levied. I see no great risk to the art. The public already has largely unfettered access to the art now. Fees for rental of transparencies could be reduced, especially if the rental is of a work in which an artist has copyright. You are talking about practical issues of the money needed by museums to operate, and obviously this helps artists. I think however, asking the public to give up public domain, and asking artists to accept reduced control over their copyrights is not a fair solution.

> I quite agree that the public domain IP status of works of art cannot
> be "cancelled" by museum policies, and there is an area where the two
> conflict. What we do is to attempt to balance the two. One point I
> think I've driven home in this discussion (relentlessly?) is that
> everything a museum does *costs money* -- a lot more money that most
> people imagine. $2 million electric bills, $40,000 for a *prototype*
> showcase for preserving ancient manuscripts. And, by the way, $30,000
> for artists' copyright permissions for a recent exhibition catalogue.
> That's right: we recently paid close to $30,000 for artists' copyright
> permissions for use in one exhibition catalogue. That's just the
> permissions, not the cost of producing the catalogue. Aha. That's
> something no one has mentioned yet: the fact that museums aren't just
> image & copyright licensors, but image & copyright consumers as well.
> We're on both ends of the stick, as it were. We pay a fortune in repro
> rights and artist's copyright fees, and yes, we'd like to pay a lot
> less. But no, we don't get up in arms when we pay a repro rights fee
> for a photo of a Renaissance manuscript from the rare book collection
> of another museum or library. We know from experience that what they
> are charging is a drop -- no, a molecule -- in the bucket of what it
> costs them to preserve, document and photograph that manuscript.
 

It would be nice if the governments in Israel and the U.S. were willing to give more to the arts. That would alleviate some of these problems, and perhaps one day they will help more. VAGA attempts to work with museums to develop pricing structures that find middle ground. This is difficult however. We are still working in an atmosphere where museums charge two fees to publishers: one for rental and one for reproduction rights. Little money is left over for artists' copyrights. Given that the museum has no copyrights in public domain art, and no real copyright in photography of art, which is held by copyright by an artist, we have never understood this practice of charging for "reproduction" rights. Until many museums change their attitude that owning a work means controlling it in all manner, it is difficult to find compromise. It is interesting, that with the exception of you, (and even you say that you have been "lurking faithfully") I can't remember the last time a museum person contributed to this forum, and to this subject in particular. Perhaps most museum rights and repro. people and museum lawyers are not aware of this site. But I wonder.

> Getting back to the question of access to works in private collections:
> significantly, the exhibition I mentioned above was of a private
> collection, never before seen outside the collector's home. 250,000
> visitors stood in line for up to 4 hours to see these works of art
> *which we succeeded in providing access to.* Producing this exhibition
> was tremendously expensive, and despite its success, to the best of my
> knowledge we didn't even break even. We failed to make a profit, and
> we should have: as a non-profit institution, we should make as much
> money as possible in order to invest any profit back into our cultural
> and educational programs, as required for non-profit status. In short,
> yes, we must earn income from our collections, or cease to exist. If
> we cease to exist, you won't have exhibitions to go to, nor access to
> collections. What would PD status be worth then?

I must reiterate, it is not an acceptable trade-off to reduce artists' copyrights and dissolve public domain in the interests of museums staying in business. I wonder how much of a museum's bottom line is affected by rights and reproductions revenues or expenditures on artists' rights fees when the museum is the publisher. I know it is blasphemy to say this in art circles, but is it necessary for many museums to buy as much art as they do? We all know that many (most?) museums display only the tiniest portions of their collections. I would guess that there are thousands (millions) of works at the MET that will never be seen by anyone other than the curator who bought them. While access to scholars is crucial, could not some compromise take place here?

Robert Panzer
Executive Director
VAGA
work email: rpanzer.vaga[_at_]erols.com
<bigbusie[_at_]aol.com> Received on Mon Apr 26 1999 - 17:12:29 GMT