Art and Technology Merge

~ Laura

art

Museums are giving it away for free.

As the music industries and newspapers struggle with retaining ownership of (and income from) words and music, musuems are putting their collections online. Not only can the public view famous pieces of artiwork, they can also download high resolution images and even alter the images to create their own works of art. All for free. No $15 “suggested” admission price.

For fun, play with Google Art collection or the Rijksmuseum.

This is pretty amazing stuff. Why are art museums going in the opposition from newspapers, music, and book publishers? Maybe greater access to the arts will drive foot traffic to the museums? Is this an attempt to bring younger art patrons into the fold? Is this a good model for the opera, the ballet, and the classical music industries, which are suffering from the aging of their audience?

Published by Laura

2 thoughts on “Art and Technology Merge”

  1. Well at least part of the answer is that museums are not-for-profits with a mission of bringing art to the people, while newspapers, music and book publishers are for-profit entities that are supposed to make a profit for their shareholders.

    When a museum puts its collection on line and the board asks how they’re going to monetize the effort, the answer can be that they are doing it to serve the public (and, their board is probably in sync with that mission). Harpers can’t give that answer to their board.

    The not-for-profits fail when they undercut their efforts to raise money, but their methods for raising money don’t just depend on admission fees.

    Like

  2. I agree with bj. They’re non-profits, with the mission to make their holdings available to the public. Their primary mission (in my opinion) is not to increase the number of visitors. It’s to make art available. Many museums have nights on which they charge no entry fees.

    Most art nonprofits lose money on ticket sales anyways. When they try to persuade people to donate, it’s more persuasive to say, “we made x% of our collection available online, would you like to help us make y% available?” than to say, “we could raise our ticket price by $1.”

    Like

Comments are closed.