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Editorial
by:
Elspeth Moncrieff
The Victoria and Albert Museum has recently announced that it will stop charging reproduction fees for museum objects used in scholarly publications. This brings it in line with some of the other major international institutions such as the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery of Australia. Perhaps even more significant, their lead has been followed by the Art Fund, Britains leading art charity which assists museums to acquire works of art. The Fund has donated works to over 600 institutions in Britain since its foundation in 1903 and this decision will therefore permeate down to regional galleries the length and breadth of the country.
The announcement comes as a response to a growing crisis in art publishing. At present there is a massive discrepancy between what different institutions charge for reproduction fees and it is often the smaller regional museums, especially those run by local authorities, which are the greediest. Even though they profess to be institutions dedicated to the promotion of culture and learning their attitude is making it impossible for their collections to be used in an educational way.
Wendy Baron, author of a new catalogue raisonn￩ on Sickert, tackles the subject of reproduction charges in the January 2007 edition of the Art Newspaper. Each institution sets its own procedure, and its own charges. Bureaucracy runs amok. Faxes and emails fill reams of paper with convoluted terms and conditions. Negotiations are imperative. I found little difference between galleries in the UK, Continental Europe and the English speaking world.
Image copyright has become part of the cost recovery fees sought by non-profit institutions. Ms Baron questions the iniquity of charging reproduction fees for images of works owned by herself. She cites the Tate who charged ﾣ317 for sixteen small-scale illustrations and the Royal Collection Enterprises who charged ﾣ77.55 for one image. She questions whether this practice is actually legal.
When it comes to internet publishing, the situation is even more dire. While the British Museum waives its fees for non profit-making web sites of a cultural or educational nature few other institutions are so charitable. Dr Richard Stevens last year was awarded a PhD at Birkbeck College London for a catalogue raisonn￩ on the British landscape artist Francis Towne (17931816)a minor artist most of whose work can only be viewed by special request. He wanted to publish the catalogue online as a cheaper more accessible alternative to a book version. Tate insisted on ﾣ100 per image even though every image was already available on line on their site. Birmingham wanted ﾣ90 per image per year. Says Dr Stevens, Their initial quote was for ﾣ80 per month so to have their seventeen images on line for three years would have cost ﾣ48,960. If every gallery took Birminghams line the project would cost me ﾣ1.95 million in reproduction fees alone.
Smaller regional galleries are more cash strapped than major national institutions, but in charging fees for images in educative and scholarly articles they are failing in their remit as educational institutions and doing themselves a gross disservice as in many cases the objects in their collections are simply not being published and promoted. They are making it impossible for all but the major academic, financially backed, projects to appear in print or on the internet.
The larger institutions on the other hand have marketing staff who understand that the value of promoting their collections far out weighs any trifling income from reproduction rights. They have public relation departments able to operate with a measure of autonomy from the rights and reproduction departments. In a recent public debate in the British press over the development of a tract of Constables countryside in Suffolk, the National Gallery made images of Constables paintings in the collection freely available to the press. The resulting publicity and increased public awareness of our collection far outweighed any potential income from charging for the images, explained a gallery spokesman.
This recognition of the high value of non-monetary benefits reinforces the response of the Association of Art Historians of Great Britain and Ireland to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (UK 2006), and puts to rest objections presented by institutional bureaucracy. By displaying and discussing works of art interest in them is increased. Compensation would therefore come in a non-monetary form: free advertising for the works of living artists, and for museums, increased visitors and help in fulfilling their mission of making artworks accessible to all.
With the example of the V&A and the Art Fund to the fore, is it not high time for ICOM to propose some form of international conference on museum reproduction fees? Where some have led, others must now follow. A codified, regulated standard in this arena and an end to excessive charges will diminish the need for an overburdened bureaucracy. What has become lost in the chase for the dollar is that without specialised art historical research works in collections languish, seldom if ever to be seen, scholarship falters and the publics knowledge of a museums holdings stagnate, leading to the great nightmare of diminishing attendance figures. |
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