Judging by the notes for their seasonal collections, designers such as Dolce & Gabbana and Givenchy wander museums and galleries all the time, looking to borrow inspiration and ideas from the past. For the museum, ownership is nine-tenths of the law, but what’s left of that fraction belongs to everyone else. Sometimes more than others.
In his documentaries, Frederick Wiseman peers inside such institutions to observe how they function. His latest, National Gallery, deftly focuses its lens on the famed London art museum as it addresses issues large and small, including the role of the public gallery in the modern world, how to cultivate a new audience for art and how to encourage the public to see Old Masters as relevant, particularly when so many other cultural media are vying for its attention. In one scene, a curator is dubious about any initiative that doesn’t apply to the mandate of boosting visitor attendance.
The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has no such qualms. Earlier this year, the Amsterdam institution teamed up with Etsy to promote its new, free, high-resolution downloads of more than 200,000 images of artworks in its collection. The idea is to inspire both amateur and professional creatives around the world to manipulate and transform the original images through their work.
“Collaborating with Etsy was a no-brainer because it has over a million creators who offer their own products – and we are the perfect raw material for many of these creations,” says the Rijksmuseum’s head of publications, Martijn Pronk. “We offer patterns, colours, images. As a museum today, you also have to have a good website – it’s the same as having a roof on the building.”
According to Pronk, the initiative offers a new perspective on (and perhaps subversion of) the meaning of public domain as it applies to creative works. “I think sometimes my boss is like the Fidel Castro of art – he wants to give the art back to the people,” he jokes from his Amsterdam office. “For us, the most important thing is that we … don’t own the collection. It is not our property; it belongs to everybody.” This collective prerogative includes not only encouraging people to look at the artwork on a visit to Amsterdam and buy images on souvenir fridge magnets, “but also to make it their own. That’s why we offer the possibility of downloading everything you like from our site.” And there are already precedents for such an initiative: It’s much like sharing a cover of, say, a Handel concerto on YouTube.
To date, downloaders have used the Rijksmuseum’s imagery to make everything from decorative cushions and plates to iPhone covers and even a guitar. The details on a pair of leather boots take inspiration from an 18th-century scale model of a ship in the museum’s collection.
“Since the digital world is all about images these days – Instagram and so on – this is an opportunity for our museum because we are also about images, and we want to play a part in that trend and adapt,” Pronk says.
In his view, artistic institutions need to seriously re-evaluate existing paradigms to meet the demands of modern consumers. Prohibiting photography within their halls, for instance, “is so old-fashioned. This is not today – everybody has a camera! Not allowing photographs is really silly.”
Similarly, the Rijksmuseum will continue to serve “our more traditional customer groups and visitors,” he says, but it won’t limit itself to them. “Some people have a completely different point of view and aren’t interested in the art over all, but in, say, the cats in our paintings. I think that’s no less valuable; it’s just completely different.”
One of the Etsy artists who regularly manipulates and incorporates images from the Rijksmuseum’s collection into her work is Montreal-based designer Angie Johnson, who has also collaborated in the past with contemporary photographers and painters on original patterns and prints for her lingerie and fashion lines. “They need to get people to look at them – either online or in the museum in person,” she says of the works in question. “It’s not about selling a product; it’s about people experiencing and being exposed to art.”
This fall, Johnson will be offering a follow-up to the $280 fringed silk kimono she has emblazoned with Jan Asselijn’s painting The Threatened Swan, which was twice as popular as any other item in her collection. “You’re working with imagery from a 17th-century master,” she says. “You can’t even really compare.”
Maybe not, but what about the original? Where, ultimately, does it fit into the equation? “If ever you are visiting Amsterdam and know of our collection,” Pronk says, “we hope of course that you will also visit the museum.”
E-mail: natkinson@globeandmail.com