Sociable Museums

Among the main qualities of Web2.0 I like most are that it is: diverse, creative, generous, laid-back, useful, and contradictory. Today I will focus on the two last ones: usefulness and paradoxes.

As in all Guggenheim Foundation Museums, Guggenheim-Bilbao Museum does not allow visitors taking pictures or recording videos inside the building. This policy maybe had any relation with art works' copyright or more probable indeed, with Frank Gehry's copyright and any possible commercial use of the Guggenheim Foundation images. However, it is my belief that this policy is pretty outdated, moreover, it is unfair for visitors and it definitively works against the institution itself.

Since visitors are paying their entrance to the building, any potential copyright issue should be considered part of the ticket fare, as it could be the case regarding museum's maintenance expenses, personnel, etc. That used to be the reason why visitors get upset whenever they realize they are not allowed to use cameras inside the Guggenheim Museums: because they had already paid the ticket and they do not want to pay two times for the same thing.

Maybe you were right now thinking that this is because of artists' copyright reasons and that artists should be paid back in case of any audiovisual dissemination of their work. Of course that is something I totally agree with, but ideally this should be previously negotiated between the museum and the artists themselves without being a trouble for visitors. It should be a real issue if the Guggenheim Foundation was not able to negotiate the rights of its temporary exhibitions, or even worse, if it did not hold the rights of its own collection. In addition to this, any possible missuse of the images taken would be the responsability of the person publishing them, not of the museum.

So let us say that the Foundation has under control all these copyrights. In that case, anybody could think that what really happens is because of a commercial strategy to control all images of the museum to further sell them, renting the space and/or the right to take images inside. In other words, the Guggenheim Foundation seems to be choosing exclusivity as its management policy, something that is really opposite to Web 2.0 principles and new trends among general public and art museum's visitors/users.

The video linked above is a fragment of the DVD Architectures, Vol. 4 (2005) produced by Facets Multimedia. I can guess that the company paid a good amount of money for being allowed to record inside both the building and behind the scenes. Although probably the original DVD holds any copyright, this documentary production is however available in Google Video, and it is free.

Despite its image quality is really bad, this online copy permits us to share its contents in this vlog and to let some others to know and experiment the wonders of Guggenheim-Bilbao Museum. What is more, I am sure that after posting this video on Sociable Museums, some of you will feel curious and willing to visit it (and paying the ticket.)

In the meanwhile, enjoy this interesting video available for downloading here.