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Cover: T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, installation for The Eternal Frame (detail), 1976, mixed media, Long Beach Museum of Art. Pictured are artists Jody Procter (left) and Chip Lord (right), and Doug Hall on screen as the “artist-president.” The Eternal Frame installation will be re-created for the Getty’s California Video exhibition in 2008. See p. 22.© 1976 T. R. Uthco/Ant Farm
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Director’s StatementThomas Crow on the Villa scholars program in its second year
Ancient “Identity Theft”Erich S. Gruen takes a closer look at stereotypes and subversion among the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean
Acquisition FocusClaire L. Lyons finds inspiration in Pierre Trémaux’s Exploration archéologique
From Salvation to EmpowermentJan N. Bremmer’s European notes on contemporary American religion
The Cultural CommonsThomas Moritz evaluates democracy and digital progress
Screen TestJessica Kedward-Sánchez on the future of video art at the Getty
EndNotesPublications, recent acquisitions, exhibitions
TributeHerbert Henri Eduard Hymans, 19�5–�007
Editor’s PostscriptCarolyn Gray Anderson on taking risks
GiftsResearch Library Council acquisitions
First Draft, The Newsletter of the Getty Research Institute, No. 6
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Arts and humanities institutions—and, specifically, the “memory institutions”1: libraries, archives, and museums—exist in a larger cultural and political context. Those of us who have spent most of our professional lives in such institutions may too easily lapse into a narrowed, self-referential mindset, forgetting that we have both effects and obligations in that larger world.
The Cultural Commons
Democracy and Digital Progress
b y T h O � A s � O R I T � T h O � A s � O R I T �
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a few days in Pakistan, I felt some shock looking at those images
and hearing those sounds, aware of the grating contrast with
the culture outside the shop doors. A few days later I wandered
the streets of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province,
then, as now, a center for Taliban activity. The fundamentalist
madrassahs were well stocked with religious texts,5 while no
media shops were apparent and the library shelves of the local
university were quite empty.
The resources that compose the fabric of our cultural
lives—that we often take for granted in Los Angeles and at the
Getty—were not available to most in Pakistan, whether in the
“traditional” form of books, journals, and newspapers; or galleries,
lectures, concerts, cultural dialogues, films, videos; or the more
“contemporary” forms of Web-based digital media.
Today, even in the wilds of Topanga Canyon, I receive e-mail,
phone service, newspapers (from Europe, North America, Asia),
journals and books, TV, FM radio, and much more directly over
the Internet. In Pakistan today, and throughout most of the devel-
oping world (“cyber-universe” notwithstanding), such resources
are available only to a small and privileged elite.�
For more than twenty years I have been given opportunities
to travel worldwide, primarily seeking better ways to share our
common knowledge of the natural world in support of environ-
mental conservation. I have become more and more sensitized
to the ways that the United States is represented internationally
and to the ways that we encourage others to understand us.
Whether in passing gringada jokes and comments or in news-
papers and media broadcasts, we are often, at best, parodied
as well-meaning but clumsily destructive caricatures in our own
situation comedy. Again and again we seem to flaunt what is
least estimable in our society and culture.
Toward a Global Digital CommonsIn 1�07, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The field of knowledge is the
common property of all mankind.”7
Jefferson was not naively expressing a utopian vision. He
clearly understood the practical implications of his proposition (in
the 1790s he noted the importance of preservation of knowledge
by the provision and maintenance of multiple copies of texts).
The compromises concerning copyright and patent codified in
the U.S. Constitution reflect the wisdom of this Jeffersonian
view. Many have attributed the notable successes of American
culture and economy to the wise balance the Founding Fathers
Although not always well appreciated, a strong and inex-
tricable link exists between the fundamental mission of our
cultural institutions and a common ethical imperative to nurture
and secure tolerant, secular democracy.� The mission of most
such institutions—whether explicitly or implicitly—focuses on
the creation and sharing of knowledge for the common good. In
this regard, the mission of the J. Paul Getty Trust is both expansive
and exacting. The original Trust Indenture of 195� requires “the
diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.” A more recent
expression states: “The Getty focuses on the visual arts in all of
their dimensions and their capacity to strengthen and inspire
aesthetic and humanistic values . . . with the conviction that
cultural enlightenment and community involvement in the arts
can help lead to a more civil society”� (emphasis mine).
Without launching a complex epistemological digression,
it seems useful to note that “diffusion of knowledge” implies
more than the simple dissemination of conventional products
or expressions of knowledge, as in books, articles, or exhibits.
“Diffusion of knowledge” also implies nurturing, developing,
and sharing knowledge of the process and practices by which
knowledge is developed and created. With respect to the Getty’s
mission, this means close awareness, systematic documenting,
and open sharing of the methods of critical scholarly practice
and discourse by which we come to understand the intelligence
of art. Arguably, a primary defining feature of this historic era will
be the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the underlying
powerful technologies that have enabled them. Only the revo-
lutions in genomics and nuclear physics seem capable of rivaling
them. If, as much of our recent history suggests, advocacy for
secular, rational, tolerant democracy is a primary goal of this
historic era, I believe that cultural institutions must reconsider our
mission in the context of the powerful, convergent technologies
that have created the Web, with its demonstrated potential for
building networks that are truly global both in reach and
comprehensiveness.
We must reconsider how our mission-consistent “content”
is now distributed and licensed for use—both conventionally
and on the Web. As a culture and as a society, we must make far
more serious investments in developing and sharing globally
the very best elements of our artistic and humanistic culture.�
Some Observations from the FieldIn October 199�, I walked into a video shop in the upscale Clifton
neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan. The walls were filled with
Hollywood posters of Rambo, armed to the teeth, and with re-
vealing pictures of distressed actresses in distressed garments.
The bootleg tape shop down the street offered the predictable
array of music, some Asian but mostly Western pop. After only
Facing page: Detail of a hand-colored engraving of a lead/tin wire’s reaction to electricity in Martinus van Marum, Beschreibung einer ungemein grossen Elektrisier-Maschine (Leipzig, 1786–1798), pl. 9. In this plate, Marum shows one of many phases of the fine lines created though a wire’s contact with a large amount of electricity generated by a machine of his own invention.2675-394
17
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Sadly, it has been a dominant and simplistic fallacy of this
political-economic era that, as a single article of faith, somehow
the market can fully support the costs of fulfilling mission, thereby
producing a more civil society. In the 1990s, I often heard the
mantra “No margin [e.g., revenues], no mission.” However, this
assumption is a relatively recent phenomenon. One need only
look to the burgeoning of the arts through public sector support
since the 19�0s. And my personal experiences in Pakistan and
throughout the developing world suggest that sole reliance on
“the market” will not successfully meet the challenge of building
strong and vibrant democratic societies.9 Public investment and
appropriate provisions in law to insure parity of access and use
have made essential contributions to the continued vitality of the
American experiment.
In the past twenty-five years, inadequacies of support both
from the public sector and the philanthropic sector have too
often forced a resort to market-based fees for provision of basic
mission-defined resources and services—and, most particularly,
for publications, whether traditional printed publications or
digital resources. (I will note here that print/paper and digital
formats do not pose exclusive alternatives. They represent parts
of a spectrum of choices that can contribute to diffusion of
knowledge.)
The Web?It is both a premise and a promise of the World Wide Web that
“information wants to be free.”10 But, while Stewart Brand’s
challenge, issued in 19�� at the first Hackers Conference, may
be compelling, information, irrespective of format, inescapably
carries real costs (and in some instances it can command signifi-
cant revenues).
Surveying the early history of the Web, it seems clear that the
Web has become an unprecedented, rich venue for democratic
discourse and individual expression (as well as for marginalia
and graffiti), but it has not yet fulfilled its promise of egalitarian
access to resources like contemporary books and journals11—
media for which dissemination traditionally has been dependent
achieved between incentives to authors and inventors for their
creations and innovations, and the reversion of these “products”
to the public domain for free public use—including commercial
application.
This equilibrium between recognition of and compensation
for novelty and the requirement for sharing is also reflected in
the observations of philosophers of science. Robert K. Merton
noted that, given the accretive nature of science (and, at least by
implication, of human culture), uniquely original contributions
to the common fund of knowledge are necessarily quite limited.�
The American public library and the tradition of public
library services—as Andrew Carnegie and many, many other
distinguished Americans have realized—is a direct institutional
expression of the Jeffersonian ethic respecting our common
fund of knowledge (as is, in fact, the strong and vibrant tradition
of American publishing). And the broader tradition of great
public museums and allied cultural institutions is fully resonant
with that tradition.
We proudly note that the Getty, taken as a whole, is a
tremendously productive cultural center. We produce a rich and
various array of cultural services and resources ranging from the
glamorous (exhibits and events) to the utilitarian (conservation
techniques, bibliographies, and vocabularies); but all these efforts
make valuable contributions to the cultural commons and stand
in useful contrast to the entertainments with which America so
abundantly supplies itself and the world.
In this context, it is important to note that the capacity of
the cultural community to make contributions is based on a tax-
exempt status that is, significantly, a form of social investment
amounting to many billions of dollars. The intended missions of
cultural institutions are the definitive basis of their tax exemption;
thus, tax exemption is a form of social contract, not an entitle-
ment, institutionally or personally.
Above: Ilene Segalove, What Is Business? (detail), 1982, single-channel color video, 29 min. Segalove’s work will appear in the 2008 Getty exhibition California Video.© Ilene Segalove
Facing page: William Wegman, To the New Gallery, 1993, colored ink on paper (recent acquisition).© William Wegman 2007.M.1
As directions for an imaginary performance that marks the Holly Solomon Gallery’s move from Fifth Avenue to SoHo in New York, Wegman’s map speaks more to the process of making one’s way around the city and knowing the important turns to make on certain streets (or perhaps not) than to providing effective locational information. Thus, Wegman disseminates way-finding information that yields a cache of knowledge not limited to the ostensible destination.
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P u b l I C O R P e R I s h
Brewster Kahle, head of the San Francisco-based
Internet Archive, insists that it is decidedly within
our grasp to provide universal access to knowl-
edge. Kahle and his team archive an average of
thirteen terabytes of digitized information every
month, from online material such as expired Web
pages to music, film, books, and images. Success-
fully securing funding for their project, they have
established that to scan, make universally avail-
able, and permanently archive any book costs
around thirty dollars—a surprisingly economical
endeavor. Like Tom Moritz, Kahle warns that we
must not allow the thirty percent of the project
that’s troublesome to interfere with digitization
of the other seventy percent. Seeing no reason
that every book ever published can’t very soon
be made available online, Kahle observes of the
vast numbers of books being written in the world,
“At most it’s six billion people typing at sixty
words per minute, twenty-four hours a day. It’s
not that much text!” A rare and refreshingly
undaunted perspective.
Check it out:www.archive.org
Above left: Brewster Kahle (right), director and cofounder of the Internet Archive, shows Peter Bruce, director general and chief technology officer of Library and Archives Canada, some features of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It can be used to surf 85 billion Web pages, including billions archived since 1996 and no longer searchable on the Internet.
Above right: Each of the Internet Archive’s racks of data storage holds up to one hundred terabytes of digitized content. They measure six feet tall by two feet wide and weigh about a ton.
upon conventional market models. If we as a society can agree
on the necessity of providing global access to knowledge, our
dilemma is then how to meet costs with the same urgency that
we have too often directed at less worthy goals.
In �00� Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan reflected
upon the economic experience of the 1990s and diagnosed an
“infectious greed” that afflicted the American business com-
munity.1� He did not extend his diagnosis to the cultural realm;
but, arguably, the conspicuous failure of support for our cultural
institutions and the consequent forced adoption by those
institutions of revenue-producing barriers to access can be
understood as extended symptoms of that infection.
A Cultural Commons?To date, the global science community has made remarkable
progress toward free and open access to scientific-knowledge
resources. Initiatives such as GenBank, the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF), PubMed, and many others demonstrate
the effectiveness and utility of free and open access. But we have
not made comparable progress in the arts and humanities.
I believe that it is the sum of our informed, rational discourse
in the arts, sciences, and humanities that makes the strongest and
most compelling argument for modeling an open secular society
and for the continued progress of democratic innovation.
An extremely narrow spectrum of religious and sectarian
texts is easily and widely available worldwide—in Pakistan and
America—but the intelligence, insight, and wisdom of our secular
culture (perhaps most important, the dynamic and critical discourse
by which “knowledge” is democratically tested) are systematically
restricted. I want to propose that we must strategically and
systematically make our knowledge available for global access
and use. With focused public and private sector investments
in digitization, and with open and free diffusion, we have the
potential to make enormous contributions to the establishment
and securing of secular democracy. Cultural memory institutions
have a unique opportunity to lead such efforts.1�
We must no longer permit the trailing edge of our culture—
the Web as Times Square—to be pervasively available while
continuing to tolerate barriers to access for the best of our culture.
We must not continue to sustain models that contribute to market
failure by which the most deserving, the most deprived members
of our global society are denied access.
We must reconsider legal restrictions based in extremely
narrow and overreaching interpretations of “intellectual property”
and primarily driven by the special interests of the entertainment
industries. All stakeholders must be willing to be good corporate
citizens and to make modest concessions for the common good.
In the United States, we make minimal investment of public
N O T E S
1 Lorcan Dempsey, et al., “Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: A Shared Approach,”
Ariadne 22 (1999), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/ (accessed March 18,
2007).
2 In the current era, John Rawls’s concept of “Justice as Fairness” perhaps best captures
the force of this imperative. For a succinct summary, see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
original-position/ (accessed March 18, 2007).
3 In 1953 the J. Paul Getty Trust was still known as the J. Paul Getty Museum. The
original Indenture is posted at http://www.getty.edu/about/governance/indenture.html
(accessed July 11, 2007) and the Getty’s current mission statement is posted at http://
www.getty.edu/about/governance/mission_statement.html (accessed July 11, 2007).
4 The decades-long history of U.S. Information Agency Libraries and Information Centers
worldwide suggests that this imperative has been strongly recognized in previous eras.
5 P. W. Singer, Pakistan’s Madrassahs: Ensuring a System of Education Not Jihad,
Brookings Analysis Paper 14, November 2001, http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/
singer/20020103.pdf (accessed April 3, 2007).
6 I might add that recently when I gave a talk in Albany, New York, it was pointed out
to me that communities just one hundred miles north of us in the Adirondacks suffered
some of the same deprivations as those in Pakistan.
7 Thomas Jefferson to Henry Dearborn (United States Secretary of War), June 22, 1807,
http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff11.txt (accessed April 3, 2007).
8 “The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are
assigned to the community. They constitute a common heritage in which the equity of
the individual producer is severely limited.” Robert K. Merton, “A Note on Science
and Democracy,” Journal of Law and Political Sociology 1 (1942): 121. This notion is
obviously controversial and, particularly in the humanities, scholars seem inextricably
wedded to the value of individual distinction. In the arts, the individual creative act is
almost universally recognized as essential.
9 As but one example, I am aware of a situation in which a national museum in a
Latin American country was told by a tax-exempt publisher of an electronic resource
that the annual licensing fee would amount to $85,000 (USD). The cost would have
been prohibitive were it $850 and, moreover, with this type of digital resource, addi-
tional increments of use are nonrivalrous and impose virtually zero additional cost to
the provider.
10 “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information
wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—
too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable
to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about
price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because
each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” Stewart Brand, The
Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking, 1987), 202.
11 “Figures released by the largest publisher of scientific journals—Amsterdam-based
Elsevier—help explain why many scientists and others are frustrated. Its 1,700 journals,
which produce $1.6 billion in revenue, garner a remarkable 30 percent profit margin.
‘I do realize that the 30 percent sticks out,’ Elsevier Vice President Pieter Bolman said.
‘But what we still do feel—and this is, I think, where the real measure is—we’re still
very much in the top of author satisfaction and reader satisfaction.’” Rick Weiss, “A Fight
for Free Access to Medical Research: Online Plan Challenges Publishers’ Dominance,”
Washington Post, August 5, 2003, A01.
12 Testimony of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan before the Senate
Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Federal Reserve Board’s Semiannual
Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, 107th Cong., 2nd. sess., July 16, 2002. See
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/2002/july/testimony.htm (accessed April 3, 2007).
13 The American Museum of Natural History made its complete legacy of scientific
publications freely available on the Web in January 2005: http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/
dspace/statistics (accessed April 3, 2007). In the first year of availability, nearly 500,000
successful downloads occurred.
14 Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book! What Will Happen to Books? Reader, Take Heart!
Publisher, Be Very, Very Afraid. Internet Search Engines Will Set Them Free. A Manifesto,”
http://www.kk.org/writings/scan_this_book.php (accessed April 3, 2007).
funds in digital capture and provision of access to knowledge
resources. We must, in our common interest, build and secure a
global knowledge commons based on principles of fair access
and responsible use.
In making these assertions, I assume that all contributors to
our culture, particularly scholars, authors, editors, publishers,
booksellers, and librarians, have always had common cause.
Recent divisive arguments—as, for example, between publishers
and librarians—may derive primarily from differences in our
relative familiarity with and capacity to understand and adapt
to the challenges of the Internet environment. For all of us, there
have been difficulties in disentangling ourselves from exclusive
dependence on market models; but this has been much easier
for librarians than for commercial publishers and sectors of the
film and recording industries.
There may be a “culture war” going on. But the struggle is
being waged not merely at a distance on the Op-Ed pages of the
New York Times. And it is not a reflexive red-blue disagreement
between Republicans and Democrats—or, for that matter, be-
tween librarians, authors, and publishers. Rather, the struggle
exists between those who intend closed, privileged, authoritarian
societies and those who advocate for open, tolerant, academi-
cally free, secular democracies. It is our challenge as a culture
to analyze closely the “conflict of business models”1� and to
resolve the “clash” by developing fair compensation for those
with legitimate stakes, while eliminating barriers to access and
use. Thomas Jefferson would have confirmed this mission.
Thomas Moritz is associate director of administration
and chief of knowledge management at the GRI.
ethically, all but the most mercantile of cultural knowledge workers have a common mission: the widest possible dissemination of knowledge for the continued benefit of all. We must not fail to use every effective means at our disposal to provide for all our common heritage of human knowledge.
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