This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall):
- Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic.
- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything.
- The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder.
The conclusions:
- Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators)
The second-order effects:
- Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
- More people get to see fine art
- Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
The basement of the Rijks Museum is nothing short of incredible. There is so much precious art there that I don't even want to think about what damage a fire could do. There are so many works that that had not seen the light of day in 50 years or more that they had serious storage issues, never mind cataloguing what they actually had. I've been in there twice, once to look at a painting that had been damaged to help analyze the paint with a for the time very high tech chromatograph, once on invitation of the guy that ran the place.
Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters!
This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands.
> More people get to see fine art
until it's all been sold.
> Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money.
This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.
A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused.
A museum preserves cultural heritage.
The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years.
Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now.
So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage.
Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
"- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything."
Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time.
This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.
In the USSR central museums (think The Hermitage or The Pushkin Museum) would distribute a lot of art from their archives to regional museums, even to museums in small villages. So you wouldn't be surprised to see good quality art (sometimes by famous artists) even in small towns.
This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
Perhaps one should also consider changing the way we look at art. Is it a good thing that it is privatised? The legacy and heritage of past generations should by rights belong to all.
Reminds me of the time that I read in a book about the Louvre it would take 3 days to see it all. So I booked for 3 days and it’s true : together with the book it took me exactly three days.
It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.
It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit?
There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old.
Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
Or issue one-week tickets. I've been to a couple of places that do that - amazing if you have kids and they go off on one (ie have a bad day/meltdown), you can leave and not lose out.
Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too.
It makes me wonder; why not build a massive multi-story museum complex with the wall space to show all of them. Make it more like a library than a museum.
I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.
I remember listening to this episode! I often actually disagree with the host fairly often, but find him worth listening to. I think it doesn't happen because other art museums will refuse to loan works of art to you on visiting exhibits if you sell any of your artwork. The Baltimore Museum of Art (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-ar...) faced a huge backlash when they decided to sell art. Being in the DC area, I do find that I use museums differently when they are free. I can just stop in to see a single exhibit.
People in the UK should know that the Tate Gallery, being a publicly-funded museum, are required to make any items in their collection available for you to see on request. When studying sculpture I was really interested in a 1972 piece by Marcel Broothaers called Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus and noticed that the Tate had it in their collection. I emailed them and set up a time to visit a warehouse in SE London, and they brought it out for me to look at it. It's so much better than seeing things in a packed gallery, let alone a packed Tate, and you get a real sense of what the work is like in the flesh, stripped of all the spectacle and didactic trash that generally surrounds works in somewhere like the Tate.
Is it just me, or is this site not retina/high DPI-aware? All the images look kind of blurry to me.
Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality.
It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
I've seen this kind of thing from other museums too.
Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images?
The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.
The Rijksmuseum will let you order prints on canvas for what seems like a reasonable price to me:
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still...
If you hover the 'Scissors' icon in the lower right while viewing a work of art, you can choose 'Order' and then you have some choices of crop, orientation, poster or canvas etc.
I've used Shutterfly to order canvas prints. It's still ink and not oil paints, but it is on canvas. The result isn't glossy like a photo print, but it also doesn't show brushstrokes like a real oil painting, although I guess you would still see some if you sent a picture of an oil painting. They love sending out coupons that make it reasonably affordable. The canvas comes mounted on an internal wooden frame.
You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.
Are these downloadable? Just clicking through didn't seem to have any download links available.
For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually.
Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.
It's always fantastic to see these get released into the public domain. I am not someone who is trained to appreciate art, but I find it relaxing to take a break from coding to look at landscape paintings from time to time.
I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.
Does anyone know of an "awesome" list of such resources? I've seen dozens of such announcements, but I never really have the time to explore and wish they were collected somewhere so that I could look later.
I've used the embeddings (obtained by lopping off the final densely connected layers leading up to a classifier) from Alexnet and Imagenet, as distributed by Pytorch to try and cluster samples of art with HDBSCAN and didn't get great results. The graph generated by Mapper also doesn't make much sense.
Maybe there's a whole literature on this subject, but I'm way too thinly spread among interests and would love to know if there's something that's already done with standard parts to address this problem.
Density based clustering with high dimensional data will tend to struggle. This is because, in high enough dimensions, you need a lot of samples to see any density. Also distances start to look very similar (from the curse of dimensionality). To get any traction on such things you need some form of dimension reduction. For something like this non-linear techniques are going to be better. If you want a pipeline of standard parts then something like:
Pretrained-CNN --> UMAP --> HDBSCAN
can turn out relatively reasonable results, especially if the UMAP you use for the clustering is to more than 2 or 3 dimensions (often 5 to 20 is good, depending on the data). You can, of course, still use a 2D UMAP to visualize the results. If you want such a pipeline packaged up then consider the PixPlot package, designed for exactly this use case, from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab: https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot
* Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as an author of both HDBSCAN and UMAP implementations.
> The images are being released under Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication – which is essentially copyright and royalty free.
I wish there was a quality color e-ink offering, that was just a display that displayed art. I’m thinking of something like Netgear’s Meural but with a higher quality display.
Sure I could hack it together myself with an raspberry pi or something, but it would be great to have something that “just worked” that I could put in different rooms around the home.
Aren't such archives (~3TB as mentioned here) a perfect fit for IPFS? Are there any initiatives to put this and similar content there (or some other decentralized networks) and made it easily available to the public?
"Further, one person will be allowed to walk their dog on a leash at a time. However, Rutte asked that people not try to skirt the rules by arranging for a "loaner dog" if Parliament approves the curfew. "
"If you're going to pass around your dog among the whole family so everyone can go out late into the night, that's just really stupid."
And also: the dog has to be on a leash, which is a physical link between two objects, one of type 'dog' and one of type 'man' to avoid accidental one-to-many relationships between an instance of 'dog' and multiple instances of 'man' (as in 'mankind'). You are not allowed to put multiple leashes on the same dog. And you are also not allowed to claim that a dog that is sans leash is yours..
Enterprising folks are already offering their dogs for rent.
Insert rust joke about the borrow checker here...
Even more enterprising folks are researching whether walking cats is permitted and whether small rodents can be typecast to the class of 'dog'.
What is the danger of a single person walking by themselves, sans dog, outside at night?
It seems like half the government reactions to lock down is a good idea based on the understanding of virus transmission, and the other half is just security theater. Does this hurt the government's own efforts? Any reasonable person will understand that they aren't hurting anyone by walking outside near no one. Or two people from the same household walking their dog at night near no one. This may make people generally less likely to follow all the rules, because they see that half the rules are just made up nonsense.
I've actually been building a [jigsaw puzzle app](https://kaesve.nl/projects/masterpieces) because wanted to do something with their online collection. They not only put paintings and other artworks online for free, but also their meta data, through an api or bulk download (see https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/).
I'm surprised that nobody has implemented a google-maps style overlay for things like this. I would love to see the whole collection on a 2d grid that I can zoom in to see the images themselves -- maybe some organization tools to reposition the images on virtual grid for different aspects (by time, by artist, by colors) but the interface seems like such a natural fit, with dragging and zooming, rather than the page navigation they have here.
I enjoy cycling through art as wallpaper on my monitor.
There are a couple wallpaper apps for the Roku of great pictures, but they are just a few dozen images which just get really old after a while and I go back to the clock screensaver.
The same with the Comcast cable box.
A screensaver with 10,000 pictures of great art, randomly selected and displayed, would be wonderful.
I'd also like to recommend the rest of Ian's site, as it has lots of periodic, often geeky, information about London, especially Underground. Like his weekly review of alleys: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/
[+] [-] clarkmoody|5 years ago|reply
This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall):
- Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic.
- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything.
- The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder.
The conclusions:
- Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators)
The second-order effects:
- Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later
- More people get to see fine art
- Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
I think it's worth a listen.
[0]: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.
[+] [-] legitster|5 years ago|reply
I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters!
This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
[+] [-] njharman|5 years ago|reply
They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands.
> More people get to see fine art
until it's all been sold.
> Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums)
There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money.
This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.
[+] [-] mauritzio|5 years ago|reply
A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused.
A museum preserves cultural heritage.
The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years.
Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now.
So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage.
Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
[+] [-] yason|5 years ago|reply
Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time.
This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.
[+] [-] dmitriid|5 years ago|reply
This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
[+] [-] andrepd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
Museums are free in the UK (apart from special events). They are funded by the state.
[+] [-] prox|5 years ago|reply
It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.
[+] [-] trianglem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blikkentrekker|5 years ago|reply
It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit?
There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old.
Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
[+] [-] room271|5 years ago|reply
This works really well and doesn't involve selling the family silver.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|5 years ago|reply
Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too.
I imagine it wouldn't work for them Louvre!
[+] [-] rvanlaar|5 years ago|reply
In the Netherlands we have the museumkaart[0], costs are €60 per year.
Which give you unlimited access to most museums here. Resulting in a lot of people going multiple times to the same museum.
[0] https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.
[+] [-] ylem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Understated_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frereubu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingosticks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laGrenouille|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/
[+] [-] tmalsburg2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality.
It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
[+] [-] helipad|5 years ago|reply
Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images?
The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|5 years ago|reply
You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.
[+] [-] safog|5 years ago|reply
For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually.
Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.
[+] [-] er4hn|5 years ago|reply
I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prionassembly|5 years ago|reply
Maybe there's a whole literature on this subject, but I'm way too thinly spread among interests and would love to know if there's something that's already done with standard parts to address this problem.
[+] [-] lmcinnes|5 years ago|reply
Pretrained-CNN --> UMAP --> HDBSCAN
can turn out relatively reasonable results, especially if the UMAP you use for the clustering is to more than 2 or 3 dimensions (often 5 to 20 is good, depending on the data). You can, of course, still use a 2D UMAP to visualize the results. If you want such a pipeline packaged up then consider the PixPlot package, designed for exactly this use case, from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab: https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot
* Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as an author of both HDBSCAN and UMAP implementations.
[+] [-] adembudak|5 years ago|reply
So can I use them on my game?
[+] [-] mkl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randmeerkat|5 years ago|reply
Sure I could hack it together myself with an raspberry pi or something, but it would be great to have something that “just worked” that I could put in different rooms around the home.
[+] [-] fjfaase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|5 years ago|reply
"Further, one person will be allowed to walk their dog on a leash at a time. However, Rutte asked that people not try to skirt the rules by arranging for a "loaner dog" if Parliament approves the curfew. "
"If you're going to pass around your dog among the whole family so everyone can go out late into the night, that's just really stupid."
https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/20/rutte-curfew-undesirable-neede...
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Enterprising folks are already offering their dogs for rent.
Insert rust joke about the borrow checker here...
Even more enterprising folks are researching whether walking cats is permitted and whether small rodents can be typecast to the class of 'dog'.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
It seems like half the government reactions to lock down is a good idea based on the understanding of virus transmission, and the other half is just security theater. Does this hurt the government's own efforts? Any reasonable person will understand that they aren't hurting anyone by walking outside near no one. Or two people from the same household walking their dog at night near no one. This may make people generally less likely to follow all the rules, because they see that half the rules are just made up nonsense.
[+] [-] mssundaram|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaesve|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jach|5 years ago|reply
It'd be nice if museums could do that work themselves, when they can do the work to make an API. No I won't make an account.
[+] [-] jhallenworld|5 years ago|reply
https://www.arttoframe.com/canvas_wraps/
Considering that this option is available, it's odd that people buy, to pick a divisive example, Thomas Kinkade prints:
https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/
[+] [-] andrewla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
There are a couple wallpaper apps for the Roku of great pictures, but they are just a few dozen images which just get really old after a while and I go back to the clock screensaver.
The same with the Comcast cable box.
A screensaver with 10,000 pictures of great art, randomly selected and displayed, would be wonderful.
[+] [-] Erwin|5 years ago|reply