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In the debate we are hearing today among presenters, artists, commercial interests, content providers and users, there are profound implications for the meaning and role of the arts in a democratic society. Peter Vallone opened our session this morning by referring confidently to New York as a center of culture. And I see here so many luminaries from our various art disciplines -- those I have revered for many years for their inspiring contributions. So it seems possible just for a moment to speak of the arts in America as a viable healthy enterprise, allowing us the luxury of debating how to assign the benefits to be realized from new technologies.
But from my vantage point in Washington, things look a little different. I am surrounded by speculation and skepticism about the role of government in the arts and even about the relevance of the arts to society. Our visitors in Washington are drawn more from a general tourist public than from a "repeat audience" of serious devotees of culture. From this vantage point, it appears that the arts are not yet well integrated into our communities. Max Anderson this morning referred to the role of museums as "oases." Our impact on our audiences and even our existence as institutions will not be secure until we achieve a closer relationship between our arts and art institutions on the one hand, and the broader, non-specialist public, beyond the small fraction we now serve.
This insecure position of the arts is nothing new. There's plenty of evidence that it was never so prominent anyway. John Singleton Copley complained that, as a painter, he was regarded no better than a cobbler. Twentieth-century painter John Sloan called the American artist "the unwanted cockroach in the kitchen of a frontier society." Foreign critics said America's greatest art was its plumbing, inspiring Duchamp to undermine the whole enterprise of art by submitting a piece of plumbing called "Fountain" to the Armory Show. Benjamin Franklin said "one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael." High culture continues to have, at best, a precarious place in our society.
At the National Museum of American Art, our experience
with electronic
technologies
confirms the idea that the traditional
disciplines, our
much-cherished aesthetic experience, and our carefully
analyzed art historical
perceptions engage a narrow and fairly specialized
audience base. Most people
seem to agree with George Bernard Shaw: "All professions
are a conspiracy
against the laity." But our experience also points the way
out of this
situation by suggesting how the technologies, imaginatively
used, can help to
reorient our
programs. The technologies offer the
means -- though we must
still supply the insight -- to present art as an arena of
encounter where
"audiences" become "users." The semantic shift is
important for signaling that
passive receivers can now more easily become active
participants.
About a year ago, NMAA began offering on America Online -- a commercial subscription service -- an array of images and information, as well as interactive online discussions, quizzes, realtime conversations with members of the museum staff, and an online reference librarian who responds electronically to your questions within 24 hours. Something about the anonymity and informality of electronic technology invites very free and irreverent expression of opinion across an incredible spectrum of topics. The conversations show that many people out there have a genuine interest in creative expression but feel alienated from or intimidated by our institutions. Many are simply uninterested in the perspectives that arts institutions so often present, rooted as we are in the traditions of our disciplines.
The National Museum of American Art is now preparing to extend its America Online experience by offering a still wider array of museum images and information on the Internet. We have acquired the equipment and named our UNIX system "Ryder," after Albert Pinkham Ryder, a late 19th century painter and visionary. Beginning January 1 next year, we will offer hundreds of collection images, the full texts of selected catalogues, gallery labels, research files, and much more. While many museums are concentrating their efforts in technology on enhancing the experience of visitors in their galleries, we are focusing on distributing what we have and what we know to people who may never come to our front door. We want to encourage people to browse our offerings and satisfy their own curiosity about issues specific to their own lives. Inherent in our plans is an array of assumptions. A key one is that all this information we present will eventually be coded and fully searchable, so it is realistic to think people can navigate prodigious masses of information to find what they want.
Like lots of museums, too, we have looked at the minefield of legal issues surrounding copyright and concluded that, for now, while cyberspace is still a chaotic Wild West frontier, subject to highway bandits, with only rough vigilante justice, we'll focus mainly on our holdings that are not specifically copyrighted to other owners or artists. One danger not sufficiently noted today is that -- in the absence of an easy-to-use, fair and inexpensive solution to the copyright issues -- institutions with alternatives will tend to avoid or diminish involvement with living artists. Since the relationship between artists and presenting institutions is already tenuous, this would be extremely regrettable.
Returning to the philosophy of art in a democratic society, it seems eminently appropriate that our museum, as a federal and national institution, should use the new technologies to reach a broader segment of society. Many will be attracted to the rich established traditions rooted in centers like New York, but others, we believe, will respond to the active and energized impulse running through individuals and communities all across the country.
Our extraordinary political system was formed through a revolution against a dominant culture that seemed too distant from the American experience, followed by a thorough rethinking of the social contract. The arts also need to find a new basis in society, which will be much harder if yesterday's legal structures are allowed to shackle the greatest potentialities of the new media.
In a sense, our orchestras and ballets, art galleries and theaters are distant descendants of the royal collections and court entertainments of earlier monarchies. After a wave of political revolutions, the populace -- what Marty Segal called "us chickens" and Ernest Boyer referred to as "the fish" -- were finally permitted access to these entertainments. But the idea of a centralized national culture remained strong. One might read the dynamic art of the 19th century, that great age of realism and naturalism, as a long negotiation between aristocratic art formats and traditions on the one hand, and the lives and experience of a general population on the other.
As a daily witness to the bureaucracy in Washington, I am the more amazed that the Internet was created by a federal defense establishment for the express purpose of avoiding single-point centralized dissemination. This unprecedented act of governmental anarchy has inadvertently provided a key to the future of art in our democracy. It suggests that there are some enterprises that benefit from a broadly distributed and universally accessible data system that deliberately eludes the control of any group or establishment. In a sense, the Internet -- with all its chaos, with no one really pulling the strings, and with little concern for commercialism -- may offer a new model for the sharing and distribution of culture. While today, museums, libraries, theaters, publishers, and other arts presenters may determine which art is seen or known, in the near future we may simply be overtaken in this role.
What then will be our purpose? First, as we are all
inundated by information
from so many sources, there will be a premium placed on
ease of use, depth of
context, reliability, and yes, even insight, knowledge, and
point of view. And
as our world is increasingly made up of reproductions,
simulacra, facsimiles,
and other forms of mediated expression, we will
increasingly value the original
object or first-person experience, understanding just how
special it is.