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Comment by holowoodman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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