On a technical note, the Art Institute of Chicago images are being served using an API called IIIF, which allows you to scale, extract regions of interest, etc. [1]. There are about 1-2B images worldwide being served from museums and libraries using the API [2] and viewers that can work with the content from multiple institutions at the same time, for instance to compare two van Gogh self-portraits from different museums: http://projectmirador.org/demo/
Interesting. There seams to be no way to get a list of available images or a search though. How would one us this API without info about available images?
This Search API is focused on searching within IIIF content (think full text search of a book). There is currently a Discovery Working Group[1] looking at broader discovery of IIIF resources.
Trying to load an image sends 50 separate requests, when the entire image is less than 400kb. This is the exact opposite of what web optimizers try to do, which is combine lots of small images into 1 large one and use clever CSS to show small parts of the image in the right places on the webpage..
Whether to tile the image (or use client-side CSS) is entirely up to the developer. If you want to show regions of interest from large objects, it's much better to be able to extract the ROI as an independent image. For example, this scroll is nearly 100Kx4K pixels: https://dpul.princeton.edu/eastasian/catalog/1z40kx353#?c=0&...
Yes, that's fine for images like that, that's several GB in size, but there's a cut off point where tiling becomes less efficient and slower than just downloading the whole image in one request, I'd guess it's around 1/2MB, which a lot of images on this art site are.
Even if the actual efficiency is no where near that, a 1080p jpg fits in that so it's not like people would want the IIIF functionality on images that small anyway.
Students, educators, and just regular art lovers might be interested to learn that we’ve released thousands of images in the public domain on the new website in an open-access format (52,438 to be exact, and growing regularly). Made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, these images can be downloaded for free on the artwork pages.
We’ve also enhanced the image viewing capabilities on object pages, which means that you can see much greater detail on objects than before. Check out the paint strokes in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, the charcoal details on Charles White’s Harvest Talk, or the synaesthetic richness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music. If you are doing research, you’ll appreciate how our collections search tool makes it easier to drill down and find exactly what you’re looking for.
Is it common that a museum can release photographs of the works like this? Aren't (maybe just more recent) works copyrighted in a way that would prevent a museum from doing this?
The images are almost certainly in the public domain under current U.S. case law. Releasing them under CC0 is a way of saying, “just in case they aren’t in the public domain, now they effectively are.” I don’t know what you mean by unenforceable—what is there in CC0 to enforce?
if you want to release images as public domain, you might also wish to release them with a CC0 license since I have heard (but don’t know any specific examples) that there are some situations/legal jurisdictions where use of a public domain asset might be unacceptable, but a clear license mostly equivalent to the public domain is acceptable
in Australia, yes a photographic reproduction of a 2D artwork is copyrightable. this was a point of conflict between the wikimedia foundation and a gallery i used to work for, which made a significant income from licensing photos of artworks, many of which were themselves in the public domain. this might seem unreasonable but it’s worth pointing out that producing highest quality photo reproductions of artwork is a specialist skill requiring quite expensive equipment, and there are specific choices that must be made that are on some level subjective. to put it in hacker news language- it’s a lossy operation and the photographer decides what is and is not important to keep- e.g. textural or reflective properties of the paint, vs. vividness of colours. and how exactly are you supposed to reproduce photographically the gold foil on gustav klimt’s work?
A CC0 license or some such could well be a reasonable hedge against such vagueness by making explicit the terms of use.
A Xerox machine is a complicated, specialist piece of equipment but using one to duplicate the work of someone else is not and should not allow copyright on the duplicate.
What your colleagues did is literally reproduce the work of another, and assert copyright on the copy.
What if I took the image your gallery took, used state of the art JPEG compression software on it and created a new optimized file, would I know be entitled to copyright on that?
People who defend the legal position with "But it's creative effort!" do not quite understand the test that applies, and are not actually explaining things correctly. The legal test in British law is whether it is original, the qualifiation that is used in the legislation itself, and there have been a few landmark cases in the 20th century where originality most definitely did not mean creativity. Indeed, it is one of the little-mentioned problems with BrExit that it has quite drastic effects on copyright law, as some of the legal tests that apply derive from EU Court of Justice decisions that may or may not continue to have force. It has been opined by some that the so-called "Infopaq" standard may cease to be applied by British courts, which may revert to older, lower, thresholds for originality.
But a Xerox machine does not add any creative aspect; if you are going to shoot a painting and do it well, you'd need to decide on what lighting you wanted, then rig that - say, side lighting to highlight the brush strokes or a more head-on, softer light to subdue them.
In your jpeg example, I think (IANAL!) you might have had a stronger case if you artifacted the heck out of it, rather than faithfully recreating the original photo - the artifacts could be argued to be some form of artistic expression.
How can it be creative if it literally is attempting a faithful reproduction? You are confusing work with creativity. It might not be easy, it might require a lot of effort by specialists, but it is not creative. Therefor should have no copyright protection.
As I suggested - the photographer may decide to highlight the brush strokes, for instance - or subdue them. Both approaches would be a faithful (as such things go) reproduction of the original artwork; its appearance would depend, among other factors, of the light you saw it in.
That being said, I am not convinced such reproductions should have full copyright protection on par with that granted an original work of art - but there ought to be some mechanism to recognise the effort and skill which went into creating it; otherwise there would hardly be any incentive to create high quality reproductions.
Reading over the linked page, it appears that the distinction is how much originality there is in the photograph. In this case, it seems clear the museum is just posting a "mere copy" without any embellishment or artist changes.
So I guess I'm with the OP about being unclear what the value of the license is. Oh well, maybe it's just a simple CYA/clarify expectations/whatever.
There was once a time when the only way for the average person to see a beautiful painting was to go to church. Later on this role was taken up by art galleries. Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home.
What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for? Different ones are answering this question in different ways. Some are reinventing themselves successfully, others not so much.
I am particularly interested in the destiny of galleries in smaller markets. They are easier to sustain in large cities. In cities with fewer than a million people, the struggle for relevance makes for a challenging environment.
(My questions aren’t rhetorical - I sit on the board of directors for a Canadian gallery in a city of 500k people - we have one of Canada’s largest collections and an incredible program, but nothing is easy...)
> What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for?
Although it's great being able so see the image on your desktop the experience of seeing the actual artwork is very often much better.
On screen you'll miss out on much of the subtly of texture, surface finishes, scale, framing, the ability to look at it from different angles and distances and more. These all add a lot to the viewing experience.
Art museums are very pleasant places to be, and create an aura of sacredness that is never going to exist on my living room couch.
This may displace museum visits by people who need to look at paintings for utilitarian purposes (research, homework) but if anything, finding a great painting here will only want to make me go the museum more.
The advent of digital accessibility is far more impactful for local museums in smaller markets. These institutions now have access to global audiences who may never have heard of the museum (or even the town / city), would certainly never have visited in person, but are perhaps searching a wider database by artist, genre etc and encounter these small collections thus beginning a fruitful journey of potential engagement.
> This is pretty incredible. ... Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home.
Agreed. And moreover, the licensing intentionally allows reproductions, so you can print life-size posters of these pieces to hang at home, if you want.
> What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for?
Hasn’t the primary function of a gallery always been to sell art, more than to be a public museum for the average person? If you think about it that way, maybe having online galleries doesn’t necessarily affect brick and mortar galleries? Perhaps it’s possible that online galleries will push more people will see the premium value of owning original art?
> I am particularly interested in the destiny of galleries in smaller markets.
In theory, Chicago’s move here to release public domain images doesn’t change small galleries, right? Small galleries are showing & selling current work and more by local artists, work that is still under copyright.
As an artist, I hope that the rising tides lift all boats, that public and easy online access to a lot of art will be a force for art education and appreciation. But, who knows, maybe an online flood will have unintended negative consequences.
I wish these images were large enough to print quality life-sized posters. Only the smallest of them, such as the Great Wave at 10" x 14" would come close to being quality prints at the sizes I was seeing (Great Wave is 3000 pixels wide)
It's interesting to me that you bring up the topic of churches, because I've yet to find a museum that can rival the feeling of visiting a "proper", Gothic cathedral. I think the main difference is that a museum feels like it "just" holds art, while a cathedral "is" art.
About the future of art galleries, I'm reminded of a Reddit post where someone mentioned visiting a Goya exhibition. The audioguide gave enough background on the pieces that you could trace the evolution of Goya's state of mind, and as a result you could understand the man through his art. I've always been jealous of that story: I love art galleries, I've visited plenty, and yet seeing lots and lots of art has not really improved my understanding of it.
I imagine art galleries could follow a path similar to libraries: a place where you go not because of the paintings themselves, but rather as a place to learn and where the (curated) selection tells a story.
Nah, don't bother reading it. The importance of Benjamin's essay has been vastly overrated by academic art theorists. As proof I would point out that the very first image in the linked article is Hokusai's iconic "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" which is of course a woodblock print (i.e., a "mechanical reproduction") but no less appreciated as a work of art for being so.
To be able to make this point you still had to have read Benjamin's essay. Is academia not a constant conversation, constant disruption of previously unquestioned assumptions?
I would argue the continued usefulness of Benjamin's essay is similar to the writings of McLuhan - it forces you to think critically about the mode and method of the production of an image/artwork (or message), and how that mode affects (or doesn't) a work. It's a radically different and refreshing perspective for looking at art or media as a whole.
For instance - how different (and much more moving) is seeing a woodblock print of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in person from seeing a tiny thumbnail in Google Image search, a further step of mechanical reproduction?
Why do you think your opinion constitutes fact? I found the essay to hold a lot of weight with respects to the aura of art, and the presence of certain art that exists outside of a 2d format. The article goes into the concepts of originality and is worth a read to expand your viewpoints. To dismiss it seems short sighted.
What expresses the most in art, IMHO, is the nuance and not the broad strokes. In music, for example, many people can play the notes in the right order; it's the great musician's nuance that makes it art. In acting, it's the tone and subtleties in the actor's voice and expression. Reproductions don't capture that; nothing matches seeing it in person. I've tried high quality reproductions of 2-dimentional works I love, and it's not even worth it.
Also, much artwork these days is 3 or 4 dimensional (time), so 2-D reproductions have even less fidelity.
Don't dismiss the fidelity challenges even when at a physical gallery looking at original works of art.
Glazing, lighting, signage, height, framing, decor, noise, other people and many other factors can reduce the fidelity of experience or provide unskippable distractions.
The most extreme example being visiting the Mona Lisa in person, but these challenges exist with most physical art except perhaps that hung in your own home over which you have complete control.
Even the very best reproductions are not at all the same as seeing the actual work. Having high quality reproductions means I can see a decent approximation of something it would be difficult/expensive for me to go see, but doesn't replicate the experience.
I suspect the role of galleries remains largely unchanged - curation and context will always be relevant. I do think you are on to something with the issue of smaller markets: how do you convince people to come in person, and can you do it at a price point that will attract them?
I recently compared (Canadian, as it happens) ticket and membership costs for galleries in a an approximately 500k market and a > 5million market. Although the individual costs were about the same, the entire physical size of the small market one was far less that one tenth the larger one. Regardless of the collection size, this is pretty limiting. Some of the fixed costs don't scale well, and I do think this makes things more difficult in smaller markets, particularly if you are trying to draw people from outside your core market.
As more and more high quality reproductions from big markets become available, has your board discussed the possibility of curated display/discussion of collections of these? Particularly if you could have the use of a first rate projection system?
I don't think this kind of resource is going to decrease attendance at art museums. People who want to go are still going to go, but while I live near Washington D.C., and have been to the National Gallery of Art many times, there are hundreds or thousands of museums and art galleries in cities I will most likely never travel to.
I think it's reasonable to consider these digital resources as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, visiting the gallery in person.
I mean, part of the appeal of the Louvre at least isn't just that you can see the art in the physical world, but that you're practically bathed in it. This sense of being overwhelmed and the serendipity factor in discovering new works constituted a lot of the appeal when I used to visit there. You could go into there once every weekend for a year and never have the same experience twice.
I feel like reducing historical art pieces to "beautiful images" doesn't really capture what it means when something is art. For instance, you can view reproduced images of famous artwork whenever you want online, so what makes it valuable, therefore, is not just the imagery.
Salvador Dalí is a notorious troll in this regard. Many of his works are extremely well known by their reproductions. but he plays with scale- the originals are often absurdly smaller or larger than you imagine from the reproductions.
No one ever complained of flickr "Oh it's okay but you need to see the real thing", so it's interesting how this viewpoint is absolutely medium-specific.
I would argue plenty of paintings are better viewed online, sculptures far less so. Is it better to have a restricted view at the back of a live performance or see a perfectly edited video later?
It's hard to be moved shuffling through queues at the Louvre.
Virtual reality gallery viewing from your living room will be a thing, it's possible now just a matter of time they hook up these databases of art and perfect the gallery viewing experience to make it accessible.
I have long considered buying high end tvs just to use as slide show viewers in my house. I could probably justify it at this point with the number of available high quality images and the quality of screens. But I would really like a 250 ppi+ screen that is 40+ inches to pull the trigger.
I've created an AppleTV app that uses IIIF (technology behind Art Institute of Chicago image release) that was based on this. Though this content area was historic maps [1]
I educated my appreciation for painting by putting up a slideshow from Hermitage (high res images) with 5 minutes per painting, running on a spare monitor in my direct field of view. Kept this setup running for a couple of years, and it gradually seeped in. No need to rush it, just enjoy. Sometimes you can find articles on Wikipedia about the life of people in those paintings. It's like time travelling to the past.
The Art Institute has always been very forward looking when it comes to technology. In the mid 90s I was offered a job there creating a new collection tool for curators that would allow them to view ALL of the Art Institute’s collection and help them create new exhibits. I think only 10% of their collection at that time was on display. They were going to build the tool in C. They were also very progressive to hiring as I didn’t know C and the team was willing to teach me. It was a very cool job but I didn’t end up taking it.
Is there any sort of organized, searchable index of artwork online? It's sort of a massive undertaking, but it's the kind of thing that a wiki would be good for, and there have been a handful of different museums which have made these kinds of sets available.
Google Arts & Culture [1] aspires to this, and does a great job to a certain extent, however not at scale or in the long tail. For their own reasons institutions have resisted mass uploads to Google - despite the theoretical marriage of CC licences and G A&C non-profit contractual agreements. Art Institute Chicago has been a partner with Google since 2012 yet today we see only ~1% of their artworks on G A&C.
[1] https://artsandculture.google.com/
Unfortunately the images cannot be downloaded from Google Art Project (original name).
It's irritating having to jump over complicated hurdles to get a seamless hi-res image capture from Google Arts. It requires some messing about, but I previously managed to grab about 100 high res images, but it took ages and was not easy. They printed out nicely in the end though, so was worth it.
A simple download link as seen on artic.edu would be appreciated but sadly I don't see Google providing this because they want people to remain on Google, logged in, while they view art.
I was deeply involved in the project for 5 years and the reason you can't download from it is because museum partners don't want you to. All the image security you find there comes from partner requests.
If it's irritating, don't blame Google.
The word "security" can't be applied when the measures in place are "don't include a download link".
There is no "security" when the image displays perfectly fine on the screen. It just takes a few screens worth of panning, screen-grabbing and assembling a complete image in Photoshop. After a few rounds, I had a rather efficient workflow going using macros. Most of the artwork I was interested in was between 50 and 100 years old, and completely for personal use - printing out hi-res versions on paper of my choice (matte, never glossy like almost all commercial art prints.)
No. Don't shift the blame to other parties. Google decided to play ball with all these external requests. Google owns the project. Google is the one to blame.
Sorry, also no. Let me be clear, museum partners would not sign contracts - and thus the project would not exist - if these stipulations about preventing downloading were not met. It was a dealbreaker across the board, and Google's compromise was a good one. Without it there would not be this access to art and culture.
I've noticed a couple cases where Wikimedia contributors have done that legwork and extracted the original tiles; I don't know if there's any systematic effort to do so, though.
What does high-res mean? I downloaded Hokusai's 'Great Wave' and I got a 6.2MP JPG (3k pixels horizon.). That's not high-res at all when considering the original's size. Am I missing something?
A little bit of a shameless plug but for anyone interested in the intersection of art and tech, Arthena (YC W17) is hiring software engineers and data scientists.
It's great to see museums working towards spreading the reach of their collections and reaching new audiences.
Also for folks interested: SF MoMA was doing something similar where if you texted them a word they would send you a picture related to it (from their collection)
The Art Institute of Chicago is where I appreciated art for the first time. It has an amazing collection, and it's not an overcrowded zoo, especially on weekdays.
I'm glad they state on their website that the images are in the public domain.
In a similar thread on HN some time ago, I was very surprised to learn some museums (and commenters) think that they own the copyright to high-resolution digital reproductions of their (pre-1923) collection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17500312
Indeed, but for that specific case of the Van Gogh Museum in The Netherlands, the same principle from Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was reached in the Van Dale/Romme arrest [1] and has been upheld in other cases.
It's basically impossible to browse most of the pictures sequentially because the UI keeps loading new images on the bottom of the page after clicking "Load more" and the browser will crash after loading so many images on the same tab.
It's a shame, because it obvious that a lot of work and care was put on this project.
Yeah, I found about 10% of the links of the random sampling of paintings I looked at (about 30) gave 404 errors.
The images are nice, and definitely suitable for desktop wallpaper, which is what I'm interested in, but they're not all that high-resolution. They seem to vary between 2k and 3k pixel resolution.
True, but after a certain point size doesn't matter for the visitor. I can see only a small fraction of the Met in any visit; IIRC a prior director said he couldn't see the entire collection, including the majority which is not on display at any one time, in his lifetime. If the Met grows, it doesn't change the size from my perspective.
If you are interested in specific individual collections then size might matter; if you are interested in Polynesian art, then possibly you could exhaust the Met's or Chicago's collections (I don't know).
But in some respects the two museums are the same size. And to go off on a tangent, I now find that I gain much more by spending a long time, maybe 30 minutes each, with a few works of art, rather than spending a few minutes each with 100 works. So for me, a museum with 10 great (IMHO) works would be plenty big, and better than a museum with 100,000 works that I have to sort through or walk past to find the ones I'm interested in. (Though the odds that the 10-piece museum would have what I want are a bit longer.)
I'm not sure what to think. It's a form of accidental post-modernism.
The translation and simulation of the art ends up being very post-modern in its implementation. There really is no one experience to viewing this collection; some of us may view it on our phones while at work, some people on a gorgeous hi-res screen to see every brushstroke, some on a washed-out $199 laptop screen, some on a $50 Kindle Fire as a homework project, and some secondhand, like the pictures on the blog that links to it. It's very much anti-modernist in that it denies the physical presence of art and is arguing a little for the death of the artist (i do not mean literally) by severing viewing his art from viewing the actual piece; that the meaning can be adequately shown by a simulation designed to be accessible to all, and that is reductionist to boot.
The weird thing is that this is accidental-the postmodern presentation is not done specifically for effect, but it's a byproduct of a very modernist idea about the importance of viewing great art. The simulation is created and is given weight and importance, but there is no commentary or reflection on it; the format is simply there because postmodernism is the only way to simulate in this media. To render physical artwork on the net will always be a simulated, reductionist project in some manner.
The person who goes to a museum, somehow records his experience on video, and narrates his thoughts is making in his own way an equal simulation yet superior. He is also reducing the art into a simulation, because its attributes cannot be fully transmitted to another medium without reducing it, but he enriches it in a sense by the depiction. There is the post-modern interplay between viewer and viewed, between work and audience, on display and then reflected again by the person watching his video on youtube.
Here there is still these elements, but in an odd situation. Maybe it would be like those old VHS tapes that tried to faithfully reproduce a Broadway show performance, or records that did opera. The goal is fidelity but the medium transforms it just by the simulation. It may be valuable in the sense simulations are, but it's also transformative due to the medium used. It creates a weird thing divorced from itself, but with no commentary or reasoning that acknowledges it.
So mixed feelings. Maybe its just my mountains of sketchbooks filled with amateurish art talking, but i'd prefer even an art book to this, I guess.
But this does the not-unusual thing of not saving your place if you scroll down a few pages, click through to an entry, and then click back to the catalog.
[1] https://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/#image-request-uri-syntax [2] https://iiif.io/community/#participating-institutions