Project Pitfalls

My final project seems to be drawing to a close. Overall, it's gone very smoothly; everyone has been very helpful as I've moved through the process of digitizing slides. I made one mistake that would have given my final project a different shape, however. I don't think there's any need to discuss it in my presentation--it was entirely analog. When I first visited the slide library with the head of the Visual Resource Collection (VRC), we chose an artist and she helped me locate the drawer where the Max Beckmann slides live. I sorted through the drawer, then returned a second time to make my selections; I wrote these down and then compared my choices against our database to determine usefulness and need. I also copied a list of the VRC's catalog entries for Beckmann slides; there are 52 entries and I supposed that I had looked through about that many, although there seemed to be a few discrepancies. I returned a third time to collect the slides and bring them to the Fine Arts Library and at that point, I realized that I had been looking through only about half of the VRC's Beckmann holdings. I didn't get a chance to reevaluate my choices in time to get the ball rolling on the rest of the project. Once the slides are selected, cataloging happens and throwing a wrench in that gear is not a good idea. It's fairly time consuming and precise, understandably. Thus, my final set of slides--scans, really--is not ideal, although it still reflects a strong portion of the VRC's Beckmann collection. It has been absolutely interesting to go through the whole process, and it has enlightened me greatly about the images one finds through an internet search and why they all look wildly different (examples follow!).

Digitizing Art

My primary interests and hobbies center around art, so I wanted my digitization project to have something to do with working with fine art, either at UT or a local museum. My work is actually taking a similar form to the sample project another student did in our class. I've met with Karen Holt, the head of the Visual Resources Collection at the Fine Arts Library, and I've selected an artist, slides of whose art I will be digitizing for use by the Fine Arts department. My bachelor's degree is in Art History so I'm very familiar with both slides and digital artworks up on screen in the classroom; it's edifying to see where UT's slides live, as well as the database that catalogs them, and the sources of digital images used in PowerPoint presentations. There are some interesting issues that I'll be learning about, including licensing rights through slide vendors. Fair use covers most of the images that are used in Fine Arts education, but there are still some boundaries. I hope to learn more about rights and licenses as my project progresses.

Gotcha

I just came across this article and got very excited because I know what it's talking about!
Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time

Unwittingly, millions of people every day help correct OCR'd texts via reCaptcha for the New York Times, Google, and beyond by squinting at squiggly words and transcribing them, like we did in class with our TOI transcripts. I love how subversive this is, in a totally positive way. It's just cool. (Despite Google's legal boundaries in its book project...ouch.)

Appropriation

I can't stop thinking about copyright. I had not given much thought to the fact that it would be such an integral part of nearly everything an archivist does especially in terms of digitization and digital media. It informs ethical decisions and guidelines, and can prove a huge obstacle in its interpretations.

Copyright and Cultural Institutions will surely be a valuable resource. The legal cases it alludes to are interesting resources for understanding how copyright plays out. I looked up the Roger v Koons case mentioned in the infringement section (70); it piqued my interest as an art history major, and Jeff Koons is a polarizing contemporary artist who's garnered recognition for his artistic innovation as well as for inciting controversy on many occasions; he makes his living appropriating ideas and tropes. In this particular case, Koons appropriated a postcard of a couple holding 8 puppies across their laps. Presumably regarding this as a trope that might as well be authorless (although he reportedly removed the copyright information), Koons sent the postcard to an Italian foundry to be made into a sculpture, reportedly asking for as close a copy as possible, albeit with several significant changes: adding color, making the dogs blue and giving them goofy white noses, adding daisies to the hair of the couple. Four sculptures were produced in the edition. Koons kept one and through "The Banality Show" sold the other 3 copies for a total of $367,000.

Art Rogers, a professional photographer who took the original photo, was only made aware of this when what appeared to be a colorized version of "Puppies" appeared in the LA Times Sunday Calendar in 1989. The man who comissioned the photo pointed this out to Rogers. They'd both been very pleased with the original, taken in 1980, and it had been licensed for cards like the one Koons had. Rogers sued Koons and the Sonnabend Gallery for $375,000 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages.

Koons claimed fair use, because his work was clearly derivative of Rogers' photo, and that his work was a parody, which would not have been an infringement of Rogers' clear copyright to his photo. However, the court found substantial similarity, and that a layperson would be able to see the correlation between the two works. Furthermore, they rejected the parody argument on the basis that what Koons was attempting to parody-banality of the sentimental, cute, mass-market greeting card variety--need not necessarily refer to this specific photo. Koons was ordered to pay damages and surrender the "String of Puppies" in his personal collection to Rogers.

What about the other 3 sculptures? Surely, Rogers had feelings about those, but they were almost as surely quelled by the equivalency of the money Koons paid him in damages. I find their continued status really interesting though, that the art is essentially illegal. Kind of taboo and dangerous!

Other interesting issues to me have to do with Koons' methods; most of his works are not directly created by him. This is an ongoing debate in art history, especially with modern art; how much credit to give to artists who do not execute their own works, but relay a specific idea to trusted fabricators. Could we say that all that belongs to the artist is the idea, then, which is not copyrightable? More realistically, the resulting work is made for hire, which reverts copyright of the object to the artist. It's interesting to think about, in light of the rules which are meant to protect creators and ease their monetization of their work, and to inspire creativity. I wonder how much direction Koons gives stylistically, because his string of puppies looks almost naive, like many of his similar derivative works. It's not terribly accurate, so I'm betting that he asked for the specific discrepancies in facial expressions and the like that you can pick out. Maybe he foresaw something like this happening and hoped that his changes would be "transformative" enough to protect him, a defense he has successfully used since this case.

Koons has launched his own offenses, most recently with a set of balloon dog bookends. My first thought is that you can't copyright a balloon dog. I thought of Hirtle's Idea/Expression dichotomy (page 10) which gives the example of a sketch of a spoon. You can copyright your drawing of a spoon sketch (in you automatically have copyright) but you cannot copyright the idea of spoon sketches. Koons definitely has the oversized metallic balloon dog sculpture market cornered, and these dogs are pretty consistent, although in varying sizes: they're polished steel, bright colors, bulbous. So while the product sold by the gallery, Park Life, is probably inspired by the Koonsian balloon dog as art phenomenon, I don't think Koons has a right to claim infringement. Balloon dogs are more or less commonplace objects. These particular bookends are fairly distinctive from Koons' interpretations, in size, shape, finish and color. And on a practical level, these bookends are not hurting his market. They retail for $30, while Koons' dogs sell for thousands. (Koons' bank account and reputation aren't hurting: even very recent work breaks records at auctions. I saw this Hanging Heart at Sotheby's, I still don't know what I think about it. It seemed dangerous. I do like his diamonds though.)

He probably doesn't have enough of a case in this instance. Like new media itself, copyright wasn't quite prepared for contemporary art and its weirdness. Another fairly recent instance of possible infringement in the art world comes from Richard Prince, as elucidated in this article. His ouevre is pretty varied, and has been since he came to prominence in the 70s, but one of his things is photographing-- or appropriating--ads and making blown up prints. The quality is reduced but the subject matter is still clear, as with his Marlboro Man series. He worked to decontextualize the lone cowboy from the cigarette ads themselves. He's done pretty well too, and had a solo show at the Guggenheim in New York a few years ago. This came to the attention of Jim Krantz, who shot some of the originals that Prince re-presents as his appropriated works. The article asserts that Prince is protected under fair use. I can't understand that, but apparently Krantz is willing to accept it, to the extent that he did not seek legal action; he just thinks he ought to be attributed. I think that is valid. Krantz retains his copyrights. Prince says he never really thought about ads having authors, before his work gained attention and the authors of those ads took notice.

I'm an artist, and I studied art history. I do like some of the work of Koons and Prince, so I'm not totally biased against this kind of contemporary art, and even the appropriated work, I can see the valid points that can be made. Neither denies that he copies others' work. It's sad that they can make so much darn money on it, by essentially putting an ironic spin on more "obvious" and commercial work. Copyright can prove to be very restrictive, but it's meant to protect creators, right? As well as inspire creativity. I think they're all valid artistic acts, but I think the big guys should be a little more polite.

Sources:
Art Rogers vs. Jeff Koons, by Jeff Traub http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=6467
Legalities 30: Jeff Koons and Copyright Infringement, by Linda Joy Kattwinkel http://www.owe.com/legalities/legalities30.htm
Rogers v Koons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_v._Koons

"I think that one of the things that people don't remember enough any more is that when the Internet and shortly thereafter the Web really took off as consumer services in the mid to late 1990s that whole universe was already richly seeded with free content that had been supplied by universities, by museums, by cultural heritage institutions, by government agencies." Clifford Lynch, Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information.

I don't know how many times I've thought to myself, what did we ever do before the internet, or cell phones? Generally I'd say we moved slower and were nicer to strangers. I still resist ubiquitous constant use of technology to solve problems, meaning I use an road atlas in my car and look things up before I leave home. This usually is pretty frustrating because most of the time I operate in this mode of instant information, along with most everyone else, so when I've gotten something wrong, I'm stuck.

The quote above makes me think of a recent This American Life episode, "Kid Politics," in which the final act focuses on a school in Brooklyn where the kids make the rules. The older kids petition to be able to use the internet and phones and other devices during "no screen" times. They understand the benefits of not being wired in all the time, but one kid asks, what if he needs to do research during a no-screen time, and he can't use the internet? A teacher gently reminds him about books. He says the internet is easier and better for research. (The kids vote for screens all the time, at least if they're over 13. Some are often seen playing video games, rather than researching.)

I'd love to argue the opposite, but we're really out of the age of unreliable Geocities-type anonymous web information. The old arguments about not trusting everything on the internet are still true but we're savvier now. The universities, museums, and other institutions that have offered free information for longer than the internet offer their holdings digitally, with authority. This is nothing new, but the extent to which holdings are being digitized is growing exponentially. This raises a lot of expectations about online access; we already pretty much expect to be able to find anything we need online.

My History of Digitization

It took me a couple of days to realize that I do have a history, with digitization of art--but largely, not for preservation purposes. I was lucky to work at company called Dyenamix off and on during undergrad at NYU. Basically they're a textile firm-they dye (hence the punny name), screenprint, handpaint, and digitally print fabrics. Among my many tasks was a serious mix of art handling, scanning, and retouching. I didn't really know what I was doing when I was handed a stack of original Louise Bourgeois watercolors and told to make them magically appear on the computer. The originals were at least 14"x17". That's obviously bigger than a flatbed scanner. It was really hard. Watercolor paper does not scan well. I invented file naming conventions. I took up a lot of disk space. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop, piecing as many as 6 separate scans together into one monster master file for each painting that would get cleaned up by the pros for printing on fabric. It was a pretty cool process and you can see some results in the portfolio.

That digitization wasn't necessarily for posterity, although I can tell you that the scans are archived somewhere, because I burned hundreds of discs at some point. Again, I knew how to burn data CDs, but we didn't really have naming conventions or even a good system--just CD binders and printouts of thumbnails. I guess I know more than I thought I did, but already I am looking back and cringing at what a messy job I did.

The first time I saw negative scanners in action, in junior year of high school on an exchange (to a much nicer school) in 2002, I was pretty shocked. I thought, what's the fun in that? I'd rather be in the darkroom. I can appreciate this use much more now, though I'm not sure I trust myself with scans anymore than I do with storing negatives. Finally, I've scanned my own artwork for print or sharing online; I hadn't thought of this as archiving. I'm sure I've thrown out lots of these scans but for things I've given away or sold, now that I think about it, it's nice to have a little digital archive.

I'm in this class (albeit late) for the universal reason that libraries, archives and museums are constantly changing and digitization is a huge part of that. I'm a big fan of analog, so I'm happy to read that there is a scholarly consensus that we cannot 100% reproduce things digitally. That admission is good enough for me. Improving and increasing access is absolutely part of librarianship, and digitization can do just that. Although I am not as much of a Luddite as I sometimes tell myself, I have a lot to learn, and I'm looking forward to adjusting my thinking even further.

As far as Googlehands, the term was coined by Yara Flores in an article called "The Art of Mechanical Reproduction," available here. They are the mysterious hands of digitizers sometimes spotted in Google Books. I think it's marvelous.