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The American Art Museum and the Internet: Public Digital Collections and Their Intersections of Discourse

Picknell, Amy Lynn
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374224652

Abstract Details

2013, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Comparative Studies.
Given the world is increasingly driven by technology, it should come as no shock that art museums are working to increase their online presence. Many museums have maintained websites since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but recently these museums are seeking to digitize their collections in order to make them publicly available for Internet users. While smaller museums struggle to find the finances and expertise to commit to this task, larger institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art maintain the financial wherewithal to begin such massive undertakings. However, the question remains as to why any museum might wish to make their highly-prized collections publicly available online. The impetus behind museums’ “going online” results from the European histories of aristocracy and connoisseurship from which the museum emerged, and the struggle of American museums to make good on their missions to service “the people” in spite of such historical influence. The Internet has been viewed both skeptically and liberally as a means to complete this mission, but the consequences of “going online” remain intertwined in the present formation of the public’s understanding of the Internet its liberal use of content. At best, it is currently possible to look at the previous trajectories of both these institutions, the museum and the Internet, in order to begin to tease apart some of the merging areas of discourse. At first glance, it may seem that the two are not so different, which may in fact prove true, but even the most gentle investigation under the surface of these two institutions will show great dissimilarities in their discourse and methods of control. The Internet and the museum may in fact be at ideological odds with one another, and yet that has not prevented their inevitable merger. The museum has traditionally functioned by leveraging controlled access to the content of its collections as legally manifested through copyright, while the Internet seems to incite near anarchistic access and use of its content as evidenced through “mash-up” culture. This results from the Internet’s method of control known as protocol, and the logic of possibilities it enables. Despite misrepresentations, the Internet is in practice a very controlled institution, but rather than controlling content, protocol controls the technology of the network. Ultimately, the publics of these two disparate discourses of control are unifying under the museum’s digital migration, but such a public remains a work-in-progress.
Philip Armstrong, PhD (Advisor)
Kris Paulsen, PhD (Committee Member)
Allison Fish, PhD (Committee Member)
63 p.
Art Education; Arts Management; Comparative; Technology
art museum; Internet; copyright; protocol; museum studies; science and technology studies; art education

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Picknell, A. L. (2013). The American Art Museum and the Internet: Public Digital Collections and Their Intersections of Discourse [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374224652

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Picknell, Amy. The American Art Museum and the Internet: Public Digital Collections and Their Intersections of Discourse. 2013. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374224652.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Picknell, Amy. "The American Art Museum and the Internet: Public Digital Collections and Their Intersections of Discourse." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374224652

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1374224652
675
© 2013, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License The American Art Museum and the Internet: Public Digital Collections and Their Intersections of Discourse by Amy Lynn Picknell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.