CAA News

CAA reminds you that three major museums—the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—have made digital images of works from their collections available for free for scholarly publications.

National Gallery
As part of its ongoing commitment to support scholarship and encourage research into England’s collection of old-master paintings, the National Gallery waives reproduction charges for digital images for use in academic books and journals that meet specific criteria and where orders are processed and delivered via its Picture Library website. Authors publishing academic work relating to the gallery’s collection are encouraged to use high-quality digital images available only from National Gallery Images, where charges will be waived for nonprofit, short-run publications. Discounts are also available for image use in student theses, academic presentations or lectures, and noncommercial private use.

Images are available at A4 and A5 at 300 dpi/ppi. The picture files themselves are derived from fully color-calibrated digital-image files created by the National Gallery. The color is therefore consistent across all images in the collection, meaning image users are able to make informed comparisons about color, tone, and brightness, and be assured of consistent color reproduction through to print.

Victoria and Albert Museum
Since early 2007, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has ended charging reproduction fees for its images used in scholarly publications. Publishers will be able to download images from the museum’s collection of more than 25,000 works directly from its website.

The museum keeps a broad definition of “scholarly.” The images will be available to students and teachers, as well as to publishers, for use in their research and coursework. The museum will continue to charge commercial publications, but their termination of fees for reproduction may encourage other institutions to follow suit.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 2007 the Metropolitan Museum of Art formed a partnership, called Images for Academic Publishing, with the nonprofit digital-image provider ARTstor to offer high-resolution digital images of artworks in its collection for scholarly publication—free of charge. This initiative is intended to make it easier and less expensive for authors and publishers license images for reproduction. Under a special agreement with ARTstor, this service will be available to users—both individual and institutional—who are not ARTstor subscribers.

With this important step in overcoming a longstanding obstacle to scholarly art publication, the museum aims to serve its scholarly mission by disentangling many of its most frequently requested works of art from the burden of permissions paperwork—and from the confusion that often accompanies image rental, artwork copyright, photographic copyright, and licensing. Included are many works whose copyrights have expired (generally, works created before 1923 or whose creators died more than seventy years ago) are in this cluster of images. In some instances, however, third-party copyright permissions may be needed (such as where the underlying work in an image is still under copyright). Other terms and conditions also apply.

More Information
For more information on CAA’s work on digital images, publishing, copyright, and more, please see the Intellectual Property and the Arts section of the website.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong to the position of director of the foundation, beginning November 4. He had served as Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh since 1996 before announcing his resignation in June. Armstrong succeeds Thomas Krens, who stepped down earlier this year. As director of both the foundation and its flagship museum in New York, Armstrong will focus on the pivotal role of that museum and its collection while also providing leadership and management for the three other Guggenheim institutions in Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin, as well as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, scheduled to open in early 2013.

Photograph by David M. Heald and © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

“The collapse of Lehman Brothers is destined to pass like a cold wind through the museum world,” reports Artnet.com, “which has leaned on the investment firm for untold millions of dollars in arts patronage.” Museums nationwide, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Asia Society in New York to major institutions in Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, will all need to look elsewhere for charitable donations. In addition, arts institutions in England, France, and Germany—not to mention domestic arts-education programs for school children in the US—will also see funding evaporate from the $39 million that Lehman Brothers gave as charitable gifts in 2007.

David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott at the Washington Post write that “Lehman may never hand out another charitable dime; the immediate future of the firm’s philanthropic foundation, like everything else about it, is now a matter of bankruptcy law. But the fear isn’t limited to those groups that were getting money from corporate America’s recently deceased and badly wounded. There’s agita all around.” Segal and Trescott talk to arts-institution directors and corporate funders to scope out the current state of funding in light of recent financial events.

See also Philip Boroff’s “Life After Lehman: Nonprofits Brace Amid Bankruptcy” on Bloomberg.com.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis–St. Paul recently reported that Darsie Alexander has been named chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. Alexander, senior curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, starts her new position on November 10, replacing Philippe Vergne, who served as both the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator before he leaving last month to direct the Dia Art Foundation in New York.

Alexander’s recent exhibitions in Baltimore include SlideShow (2005) and Robert Motherwell: Meanings of Abstraction (2006). Two additional shows, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972–2008, a retrospective of the Austrian sculptor’s work, and Front Room: Dieter Roth and Rachel Harrison, open next month.

Photograph by Mitro Hood and provided by the Walker Art Center.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that Thomas P. Campbell—an accomplished curator with a specialty in European tapestry who has worked at the museum since 1995—has been elected its next director and chief executive officer, succeeding Philippe de Montebello, who announced in January his intention to retire from the Metropolitan Museum at the end of this year.

Campbell organized the groundbreaking and widely acclaimed exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), whose catalogue won CAA’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award in 2003, and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (2007). Currently curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts as well as supervising curator of the museum’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, Campbell was elected at yesterday’s meeting of the board of trustees and will assume the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum on January 1, 2009.

Image: Thomas P. Campbell (left) and Philippe de Montebello (photograph by Don Pollard and provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Education and Labor Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities in the US House of Representatives is scheduled to hold an informational hearing on museums and libraries at 9:30 AM EST on Thursday, September 11, 2008. The subcommittee will be examining how museums and libraries help to strengthen communities and will specifically focus on programs where museums partner with local government entities to solve community problems. One such program expected to be highlighted is a children’s museum that uses an IMLS grant to support a collaborative initiative between the museum, the county’s child welfare agency, and the family court system.

“Museums and libraries are playing such a vital role in communities around the nation,” said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Association of Museums (AAM). “I commend Chairwoman Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Ranking Member Todd Platts (R-PA) for calling this hearing to explore the exceptional work that museums and libraries are doing to strengthen communities.”  He added, “I hope the museum field will be able to listen in on the Committee proceedings.”

The witness list for the hearing includes: Anne-Imelda M. Radice, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, DC; Suzanne LeBlanc, executive director of the Long Island Children’s Museum in New York; Mary Clare Zales, deputy secretary of education and commissioner for libraries in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Anna Nunez, executive director of the Arizona Health Science Library at the University of Arizona in Tucson; and Eric Jolly, president of the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, Minnesota.

For additional information about museum advocacy, visit AAM’s Museum Advocacy Action Center, Speak Up for Museums, or email AAM’s grassroots manager, Ember Farber. Please keep in mind that all Congressional action is subject to change, and the committee website will usually reflect any changes.

The American Association of Museums (AAM) has established new standards for the museum acquisition of archaeological material and ancient art that emphasize proper provenance of such objects and complete transparency on the part of the acquiring institutions. The product of two years of concerted research and vetting from the museum field, the Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient Art provide clear ethical guidance on collecting such material to discourage illicit excavation of archaeological sites and monuments. The standards also require museums to create a publicly available collections policy that sets institutional standards for provenance when acquiring archaeological material and ancient art.

CAA has also established Standards and Guidelines on similar topics, including the Resolution Concerning the Acquisition of Cultural Properties Originating in Foreign Countries (1973) and the Statement on the Importance of Documenting the Historical Context of Objects and Sites (2004).

Research and Markets, a publisher of international marketing and research data based in Dublin, Ireland, has just produced The International Survey of Library and Museum Digitization Projects. The study presents and summarizes data on digitization programs at academic, public, and government libraries and museums in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and more. Discussed are issues related to staffing, training, funding, outsourcing, permissions and copyright clearance, cataloguing, software and applications selection, and marketing. The International Survey is available for sale on the Research and Markets website.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has announced that Ann Temkin will succeed John Elderfield as chief curator of painting and sculpture. Temkin, who served for thirteen years at the Philadephia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, has been a curator at MoMA for five years. Among her exhibitions there are Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (2008) and Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection (2006).

The New York Times has the story. Photograph by Robin Holland and provided by the Museum of Modern Art.