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That is because the stated goal of "preservation" isn't really their goal. Thats only lip-service.

Their actual goal is getting visitors, and any kind of usable information in the form of photos, videos, 3d-scans, transcriptions or whatever leaving their premises is a problem. Add to that the associated huge business of tourism and you have the explanation why the state and the courts (who are usually good buddies with the state and the upper class, including the cultural elite) also don't want to change that status quo.

Ah, the standard Music Industry response to Napster, alive and well decades later.

"Make the information hard to get! We own it!"

Never realizing that sampling of the information makes it just that much more prestigious and desirable to us, the unwashed masses, willing to pay to visit a museum that has AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS.

If you start with the assumption that every view is a lost sale, you're going to have a really bad time.

Outside of the Louvre and maybe the Smithsonian, there are no current world-famous museums, simply regionally or subculture-appreciated museums, some with bygone fame that a small portion of the older population would recognize. The Rodin Museum may be popular among a tiny niche slice of people, but if they were to make an internally consistent strategy that they want growth then they'd release more information.

Actually, imho, the AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS are actually useless. You can not touch them, get close, rotate them, look at them properly, take your time. You are just number 29387 that day visiting the Mona Lisa, you get 5s to view it, then the line moves on.

A high-res photo or 3d-scan allows you to do all those things (maybe except really touching them).

So aside from the emotional benefit of having been near the real original piece for a few seconds, all digital derivatives are logically far better.

Five seconds is brutally short.

What painting has the largest area of appreciation, when notoriety or quality is multiplied by time allowed to view it?

The Scream by Munch can be viewed for several hours at a time. It's actually limited by efforts to conserve the painting, so the museum only expose it to light for a few hours per day.

If you time your visit to avoid the tourist season in den Haag, I think you can also view Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring for essentially as long as you like.

"largest area" immediately brought "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" to mind - not for actual impact, just because the physical painting is nearly 10 feet across, which noone seems to expect. Also it's on one wall of an enormous room with plenty of room for people to circulate, in a gallery that has various options for free access (mostly aimed at locals and students, but the art institute doesn't seem too picky about it.)

That one I have seen, and it is grand. I live in Illinois so have many options for free viewing.

When we were there, I took a picture of the Mona Lisa strictly for the crowd in the foreground. To capture the memory of the stupid number of people who seemingly only come to the museum to see that one piece of art.

Then we went and spent a few hours enjoying the rest of the museum, where there is plenty of art I appreciated more.

I stood in front of it for at least 10 minutes, the trick is to go in the evenings. Being behind a crappy plastic shield didn't help though

I’ve been told that digital (and analogue) photography still cannot reproduce all the colors in good enough detail, and the screens are still not good enough to reproduce the details that can be seen in person.

To put a darker spin on this, a not-insignificant amount of most museum collections are stolen property. Either stolen from other European countries, stolen from countries the museum's country colonized, or stolen from another European country who stole it from a country they colonized.

And to make things even weirder, China has gone on a little-noticed crusade to steal back artifacts of Chinese origin.

Comically, smaller museums generally have a "take a ton of pictures, share them on social, tell everyone" attitude because they want their name out there in order to drive foot traffic and other support.

Trying to pull up the ladder is something people only do once they're on top.

>It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.

I think people really don't appreciate just how many artifacts museums have that they don't show to the public, don't document, and largely just sit on and gatekeep. It's especially bad when you consider the movement in museum curation from showing large numbers of artifacts with minimal annotation to smaller numbers of highly annotated more "significant" items.

> (Museums in Italy are the worst, allegedly. They really think they own antiquity.)

They are the worst and they do in fact own antiquity: thanks to some idiotic national law, they can claim rights on stuff that has been public domain for centuries before the copyright was even invented. There was a lot of debate about this after a major museum sued a bunch of fashion brands, see this article for example [1].

[1]: https://ial.uk.com/the-perpetual-copyright-protection-of-ita...

This is overreach, the law seems to be pretty much about moral rights, not copyright (which I expected the case to be, with Gauthier's reputation, but actually wasn't?)

I can see how it's inevitable for national symbols to be protected under moral rights, though it becomes tricky when it's foreigners that violate them.

What's the website? I'm interested in having a look :)

What's your website since you mentioned it?

"Subscribing" to the comment, since I would also like to know. I didn't know this thing exists, and it is such a hot topic for me that I kinda contemplated if I could somehow start it myself.

You can click favorite to "subscribe" to the comment without making everyone else have to skim/skip your comment.

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