Yostivanich

Yesterday’s post dis­cussed the return of the world famous paint­ing The Scream, the biggest thing that many peo­ple said when it hap­pened was just how easy the rob­bery was to pull off. Hon­estly it was the sort of thing you could see teenagers pull off, and in fact it wasn’t much dif­fer­ent from rob­bing the local con­ve­nience store. Walk in pre­tend­ing to be inter­ested in some­thing, make your way to what you want, put on masks, pull out a gun, threaten every­body, grab the goods, run out, jump into a car, switch cars a cou­ple of times and drive away and that was it. The mon­e­tary value of the two paint­ings is esti­mated at roughly 125.97 mil­lion dol­lars, how­ever this doesn’t and never has or will take into account the cul­tural value of these paint­ings. As I men­tioned in yesterday’s post, The Scream is widely rec­og­nized as one of the most famous paint­ings in mod­ern soci­ety. Why is that muse­ums are not pro­tect­ing out cul­ture, is it that expen­sive to pro­tect art­work or can it be done eas­ily and cheaply?

I am here to say that yes it can be expen­sive, it can become out­ra­geously expen­sive very quickly. There are sev­eral rea­sons for this, guards, cam­eras, peo­ple to mon­i­tor the cam­eras, sophis­ti­cated alarm sys­tems and the numer­ous other mod­ern secu­rity mea­sures are expen­sive to oper­ate and main­tain. The inher­ent prob­lem with pro­tect­ing a museum is that the items are on pub­lic dis­play, they can’t be put into a safe, and I would not wish to deny any­one the abil­ity to enjoy these pre­cious art­works. How­ever, I think there are sev­eral mea­sures muse­ums could do to pro­vide bet­ter pro­tec­tion while still allow­ing the pub­lic to view the works unhin­dered and with­out shelling out bushels of money.

The first and per­haps the eas­i­est and cheap­est thing to do, is to put paint­ings and other art­work that can be eas­ily car­ried off behind a plas­tic case. There are two rea­sons for this, first because as we observed with The Scream art­work can be stolen in the mid­dle of the day while every­one is there work­ing, sec­ond because it allows for more sophis­ti­cated mea­sures to eas­ily be put in place. The first is fairly obvi­ous, if a paint­ing or piece of pot­tery is behind plas­tic that can not be ripped down quickly and eas­ily or bro­ken, the art­work isn’t going to be stolen in sev­eral sec­onds. The sec­ond rea­son allows for sen­sors to be installed around and on the plas­tic cover to mon­i­tor the paint­ing and the wall behind it for any­one try­ing to remove the plas­tic or the wall to get at the paint­ing. These could very eas­ily be sen­sors that are hard wired to notify either a secu­rity guard or even the police auto­mat­i­cally. How­ever this could quickly turn into an expen­sive deal to pro­tect pot­tery that can be found in hun­dreds of other muse­ums. How­ever that fact that muse­ums haven’t imple­mented this sim­ple secu­rity mea­sures strikes me as very stu­pid. It would not hin­der you from view­ing the art­work and you already aren’t allowed to touch the art­work, so this seems to be a very effec­tive tech­nique to pro­tect art­work espe­cially when you are spend­ing at most $100 or so dol­lars to pro­tect art worth in the mil­lion dol­lar range.

The sec­ond is to sim­ply pro­vide high res­o­lu­tion scans of the art­work, espe­cially paint­ings. Have you ever tried search­ing for a high qual­ity scan of famous art­work. It is basi­cally impos­si­ble to find one that is actu­ally usable. Com­pa­nies pro­mote the idea of not pro­vid­ing these scans so they can make money of off prints, but hon­estly how many peo­ple have access or the time to find access to a high qual­ity, large printer to make these prints. I nor­mally just want some­thing that will look good as a back­ground to my com­puter or that I can use to look at every once in awhile when­ever I want to. Pro­vid­ing these scans is a two fold mea­sure, first you insure that even if the art­work is stolen and never recov­ered the ideas expressed in the art­work and the art­work itself can still live on in a dig­i­tal for­mat. The sec­ond is that this would actu­ally pro­mote peo­ple to go and see the images in per­son. Sure a paint­ing looks good on the com­puter, but see­ing the scans of art­work only tit­il­lates my senses to go and see the art­work for real.

When I wish muse­ums to secure our cul­ture, it isn’t just against the art thieves of the world it is also pro­tect­ing the ideas that are expressed in the art. Art is a pow­er­ful form of iden­tity for cul­tures, mas­sive insight is dis­cov­ered in exam­in­ing the art­work from dif­fer­ent peri­ods of time. A com­plete record for his­to­ri­ans is a key in our society’s con­tin­ual reeval­u­a­tion of his­tory and what it means to mod­ern society.