Category: internet

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Decentralization

No museum keeps its whole collection on display. Meeting between Emperor Wen and Fisherman LĂź Shang, 16th century, attributed to Kano Takanobu, is only available via the internet or if the Metropolitan will opens their vaults to us.
Yesterday I wrote about an articulated doll found in an ancient sarcophagus in 1964. This story recently made the rounds of the blogosphere, even though it is 40-year-old news. Some unknown blogger—an aficionado rather than an intellectual—recognized the spark of genius in that ivory doll and shared it with the world, where it caught the imagination.
In the 20th century, museums and galleries were able to tightly control their collections. Distribution of their slides was limited to ‘serious’ students: other museums, colleges, and professionals. If you were outside academic life, you learned about art and history through books and museum visits.
If the Roman occupation of Britain is your passion, you can browse the British Museum’s Mildenhall Treasure from your living room. You probably don’t need a lecturer to tell you that’s a spoon.
In 2000, sisters-in-law Olga and Helen Mataev started an online gallery of paintings by great artists. It was the first comprehensive online gallery and has since grown to 15,000 images. Nothing like it had been available before.
Wikipedia, launched in 2001, was a major engine for decentralizing art images. Today Wikiart(75,000 images) and online collections of major museums like the Metropolitan (400,000 images), are following suit.
Interested in the Great Chicago Fire? You can browse the Chicago History Museum’s collection of ephemera and find things like this leather fire marshal’s helmet, circa 1870.
This decentralization of information is the most important movement of our time. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here. 
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The internet and art

The Romans kept their ancestor-geniuses in boxes. (Okay, they were actually shrines.) This one, from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, shows two Lares (or guardian angels), flanking the household’s ancestor-genius.
When I went looking for Iván Ramos’ photos, it was very easy to come up with them, because he is practicing an open-source business model. When I went looking for Van Gogh paintings of an orchard on Tuesday, I had no problems, because Wikipaintings is open source.
Open source started off as a software development model, but has become more generalized. It means universal access through free licensing, and universal distribution, including subsequent iterations. For artists, it’s about sharing your process and it means not worrying too much about the low-res images of your work that are spinning around on the internet. (That’s not too difficult, since we sell paintings, not images of paintings.)
We keep our geniuses in different boxes: Wikipaintings, for one, which claimed to have 75,000 paintings on line as of June, 2012.
That’s pretty much the norm in my world of visual arts, where painters are happy to share process and images of their work. But it is not universal.
I would love to show my students how Andrew Wyeth set up his paintings. But the Wyeths are very protective of their intellectual property, so if you want to study them in breadth, you have to hie over to a museum that holds their work.
I would love to show you Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins, which uses seagulls as models. However, the Wyeths are very tight with their intellectual property, and so you’re unlikely to see the series on the internet. Here are some ravens in Maine instead, which aren’t out of copyright and which Wikipaintings displays under fair use principles.
What does this exposure do to the Cult of Genius that has elevated the artist since the 18th century? Hopefully, it destroys it forever, since the idea of the artist locked in his garret and thinking brilliant but ultimately solitary thoughts, is pretty terrible for the actual production of art.
Artists never worked in a vacuum.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Giving it away for free—the journalism question

Low Bridge (Erie Canal), oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas. Go ahead, copy it, print it, and hang it on your wall. Satisfying? I doubt it. But you can contact me and buy the original, and I guarantee you it will bring you joy.
No discipline has suffered more from the internet than journalism. Its unemployment rate is higher than that of art historians, even though it was once the “something practical” that artists were told they should major in.
I worked as a stringer for a local paper in the late ‘80s. I made fifteen bucks a story back then, for which I sat through interminable board meetings. Said paper doesn’t even hire stringers any more. Evidently the water-and-sewer-line stories now gather themselves, and democracy in its most immediate form operates sub rosa.
“How do you publish photos on the internet so you don’t lose your copyright?” I was asked recently. (The writer was concerned about Facebook.) The short answer is that we give Facebook a non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any content we post. However, we don’t negate our ownership; that’s protected by law.
The same scene in a photo, more or less. Do whatever you want with it; I don’t care. Photos are a dime a dozen on the internet.
Having said that, our copyright is probably worthless, because photography itself is devalued. Today’s point-and-shoot cameras take better pictures than most trained photographers could back in the age of film. Unless you’re shooting events for a fee, are particularly gifted, or got extremely lucky and caught the Duchess of Cambridge nursing Prince George in the buff, you may as well set your privacy controls to zip and let ‘er rip. It’s difficult to protect photos on the internet, and many news sources have given up trying.
Which brings me to a curious anomaly about the internet: it’s better for painters than for photographers. No screenshot of one of my paintings will ever compare to the original. However, the character of a good painting is implied well enough in a photo that potential buyers can see what they’re getting. That means that the same qualities that make the internet so good for ripping off people’s photos make it a great platform for promoting paintings.
Oddly, one sees a similar thing in the writing disciplines as well. I can hack almost any news source, but if I want to read a novel, I go through the normal licensing channels to download it to my Kindle or—gasp—read a book printed on paper. Novelists can and do use the internet to promote their works, and we consumers willingly pay them for their intellectual property. Imagine that.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Images of Old Maine

The image on the left was shot with a Canon SD850 IS and printed on a plastic banner in 2008. It’s about 20X24. The image on the right was shot with a 2.25×2.25 format Ciro-Flex in 1981 and printed a few years after that. Both are fading, but the image on the left has spent considerably more time in the light than the one on the right, which has been stored in a flat file. On the other hand, that photo is still holding up a lot better than I am. (Yep, that’s me and my trusty dog.)

The truth is, I lied: I can’t show you any images of Old Maine. They’re locked up in a medium I can’t easily access: Kodachrome slides. In fact, my entire life prior to 2001 (when I purchased my first digital camera) is more or less stacked in a cabinet in the living room. Yes, I can show them to my children by fishing the carousel projector out of the garage and pointing it at the kitchen wall, but they lose a lot in translation. Kodachrome was the gold standard for transparency film, but unless you have a modern-day Magic Lantern, a lot of that is lost.
Of course, our slides are stored in a dry, dark, temperature-controlled environment, in which Kodachrome is remarkably stable. Future archaeologists are free to reclaim them, if they get there before someone dumps them.
My photographic lock-box, a/k/a slide carousels.
My father took tens of thousands of photographs, starting with photos of his mother in their cold-water flat in depression-era Buffalo. He was a professional photographer during and after WWII. His plates languished in his darkroom until they were tossed out earlier this year. There went a tremendous bit of history and art, lost forever.
(Ironically, it was his paintings that have survived. It’s unequivocally true that painting is an obsolete medium, largely supplanted in our day-to-day existence by photography and to a lesser degree graphic design. But that actually elevates its importance. The same people who blithely toss out photo albums of Grandma’s wedding wouldn’t dare to dispose of a painting of Grandma, for example.)
My first digital camera—a Minolta Dimage 7—did not take particularly good pictures compared to the Canon EOS film camera and lenses I was abandoning. However, the marginal cost of gazillions of pictures was exactly nil, and the images were tremendously easy to store compared to their film predecessors.
In 2001, we still thought of photos in terms of printing. Our hard drives were lock-boxes out of which we had to coax images via blurry printers with unstable inks. A mere decade later, our primary platform for showing pictures is the internet. Today, physical photos have become lock-boxes of a different kind.
And within a few short years, the quality of digital cameras and digital printing had improved tremendously. Above see two prints. The one on the left was taken with a $200 pocket camera (a Canon PowerShot) and printed on a plastic banner in 2008 (it has subsequently been hung outside in all kinds of weather). The image is about 20X24.
The one on the right is an older photo, taken in 1981 with a 2.25×2.25 format Ciro-Flex twin lens reflex with Kodacolor film. That camera was, comparatively, a much higher-market item than the Canon, selling for about $110 in 1948. Of course, one telling difference is that a 33-year-old camera wasn’t completely obsolete then. With film photography, as long as you could figure out the exposure and the lenses and back were intact, you were good to go, whereas I’ve replaced my digital cameras on average about every three years.
The photo of Antietam on the left is by me. The one on the right is by Matthew Brady, of course. It took a fraction of the time for me to find these two images on my server and on the internet than it took me to find the hard copies of the photos above.
Last summer I spent a few hours at Antietam. I am familiar with this photoby Matthew Brady; I of course took a corresponding photo of it myself. But how was I familiar with that photo? Not from the bound copy of “The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes” that sat on a shelf in our home when I was growing up—it was too valuable for children to touch. I’d seen the pictures online, of course.
One of my favorite of my own works has been a day-to-day account of the replacement of my local grocery store with a new, contemporary version—a two-year project that isn’t yet finished. I publish it on Facebook, of course, because there it gets a larger viewership than it would in any gallery. (You can see it here.)
I’m mercifully free of the need to monetize my every transaction, which makes it possible for me to exploit and enjoy the open-source world of the internet. But truthfully I’m as baffled about where it’s going next as I was about where digital photography was leading us. I hope my art stands a better chance of surviving than did my father’s, but who knows?