Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.

A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.

I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.

Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.

Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.

This is not even rare or just in niche professions - this is everywhere, and perhaps even the default if not actively fought. I always found it dishonourable myopic.

Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.

In the museum case, the preservation role is explicitely asked for. It is one of official reasons for muaeum existence.

And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.

If that was true, there wouldn’t be a museum.

It would be a warehouse without public access.

A lot of them have the majority of their collections offsite in warehouses. The "museum" is a sort of front office meant for visitors, but visitors only ever see a tiny fraction of the collection.

"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.

Not exactly. If this was the sole goal then there wouldn’t be a museum at all.

The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.

The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.

It’s not a totally crazy idea to insist that certain artworks should only be viewed in certain ways. I’m reminded of David Lynch saying something similar about watching movies on your phone:

https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI?is=Wiwxeok0Hg4jMdJu

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)

So in other words, some art necessarily has a physical dimension which cannot be appreciated in a non-physical way.

It is a crazy idea when they’re not your work in the first place. David Lynch made his movies. The museum didn’t make the sculptures.

Rodin has been dead for a long time, and the museum is obviously the closest thing to his representative. He specifically donated the buildings and his work to the French state on the condition that they make it a museum of his work.

Lynch also wasn’t talking about only his movies, he was talking about cinema as a whole.

VR?

I mean, the museum setting is an arbitrary middle ground between the initial intended presentation (a 19th century salon or 20th century gallery showing, in specific physical spaces, likely to be attended by specific people) and wherever and at whatever fidelity that initial presentation is reproduced. What's impure enough to be verboten? No thumbnails in museum brochures or online? Do we restrict entrance to the demographic that was initially present? Are we allowed to light them with modern fixtures? Must the air in the gallery be a reproduction of Paris or New York's historical smog?

An artist's intent should be respected, sure, but I do wonder how much of it is that, and how much of it is a sort of elitism and gatekeeping from people who are not the artist.

I don't think it's that complicated. The museum wants people to see the original works in the museum.

The rest of what you wrote is unnecessarily pedantic.

I kind of don't care what "the museum" wants, though. They're stewards, not owners.

Musée Rodin, 2010-2013: "The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

Then why scan them in the first place?

The museum's purpose is to preserve the artwork and scanning it furthers that purpose.

Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.

Surely their purpose is both? I haven’t read the specific stipulations Rodin put on this museum he founded but I assume he didn’t mean for them to not display his works.

I suppose I don’t think a lot on museums and their operation.

Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).

The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.

FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.

I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”

More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.

I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.

I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.

That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.

However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.

> Then why scan them in the first place?

Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.

At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.

Imo there’s a significant historical benefit in having a “snapshot” of a piece. It could degrade, be preserved incorrectly, be moved incorrectly and broken minorly or majorly. In any case you can go back in time to at verify what it’s state was then.

Excerpts from the museum's applications to the Ministry of Culture, seeking public funds for scanning its collection, statements that it reiterated over several years of renewed funding requests:

"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."

Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"

(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)

I’m curious for your thoughts on my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955346

It seems to me that the scans are documents.

It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.

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