Comments on: Digital Humanities and Fine Arts

By: nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student » Dream job: Artist in Residence at a Digital Humanities Center

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:07:51 +0000

[...] help bridge the communication between the fine art faculty and the center. I’ve talked about bridging fine arts and digital humanities before, but never really came up with any solutions. This could be one such solution. This bridge [...]

By: nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student » More Thoughts on Digital Humanities and Fine Arts

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:55:19 +0000

[...] more thought about the previous post, I think my question [...]

By: Ira Greenberg

Ira Greenberg — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:50:10 +0000

Hi Karin,
You raise some great points.
Where I teach, “digital” seems to get inserted into every conversation these days – ranging in tone from vitriolic to sacrosanct. As a painter turned programmer (I still consider myself an artist), I find the debate tiresome and primarily fueled by ignorance on both sides. I also think many people confuse digital facility with digital literacy (the software industry is quite happy to oblige on this front). Personally, I’ve been working across the digital humanities, digital arts (and beyond) rather shamelessly. Working at the level of code, established disciplinary boundaries dissolve (and eventually the temples that house them will as well.)

By: Ben Brumfield

Ben Brumfield — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:26:57 +0000

I'm probably stepping well outside any expertise I might have, but I do remember friends at Rice working on a digitization project in the mid 1990s that attempted to put together a digital art exhibit -- a sort of online art history slide-deck. This was soundly quashed once the university lawyers got wind of it, with access restricted to the campus network, and an edict issued to faculty and staff prohibiting such digitization efforts. This was before Bridgeman v. Corel, and nobody really knew what the law was. But I'm sure the experience left a bitter taste in the mouths of those involved. Bridgeman raises an interesting point about mass-digitization. Museums find themselves in a position analogous to that of of the recording industry. It will be interesting to see how they resolve that.

By: Karin Dalziel

Karin Dalziel — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:14:00 +0000

That’s a great quote Ben!

I’m not sure how fine art Faculty are at many schools, but when I got my fine art undergraduate degree in 2006, many faculty stopped just short of open hostility towards digital work. I can’t help but wonder if that is a factor. After all, the NEH probably started offering grants for digital projects because people were applying for grants for digital projects- are people doing that in the fine arts?

Libraries and museums face similar problems- we want people to come in to the building, and fear that putting too much online will keep people from coming in and therefore make us seem obsolete. However, I think libraries are realizing that you can’t just pretend the problem doesn’t exist and go one with business as usual. I’m not quite sure museums are getting that.

Where is the drive to get high quality painting images online like there is with books? Or is there one I just don’t know about?

By: Ben Brumfield

Ben Brumfield — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:50:03 +0000

The odd thing about your post is that digital fine arts outside the academy have been thriving for decades. It seems like there's been grass-roots production and distribution of fine arts since before the Web, with usenet groups dedicated to swapping scanned fine art long before MP3 enabled music sharing. Obviously, there's far more to the digital humanities than publishing analog works online, but neither museums nor universites are taking the lead in making the arts accessible to the public. Do a Google image search for Thomas Hart Benton. How many of the results are from a .edu domain? How many from a museum? While running that search, I came across a perfect example of this blindness to digital access. In an article on an exhibit of Thomas Hart Benton's WW2 paintings (an article illustrated with a single 660x390 image):

Because of space limitations, the Society is able to exhibit only six of the ten war-themed Benton paintings in its collection. “These are national treasures by a world-class artist,” said Society art curator Joan Stack. “We wanted to make them available to the public.”