The Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, original William Walters 1884 Gallery
BALTIMORE, 8 May – William Walters may have died in the 19th century, but today the museum that presents the encyclopedic collection of Walters and his son Henry Walters made a bold leap into the 21st century with the uploading of more than 19,000 images of artworks, along with associated information, to the Wikimedia Commons repository. Having already eliminated admission fees at the physical museum in 2006, the museum is living up to the Free Culture promise of our time with both “free speech and free beer.”
In a time when so many cultural institutions continue with their old 20th century mandates to lock down creative rights as tightly as possible, The Walters Art Museum is extending its gift to the city of Baltimore out to all who seek knowledge of art and culture, wherever on this earth they may be.
See the links below for The Walters Art Museum’s exhibition Public Property opening on 17 June. The museum has opened its curatorial process to its online community allowing them to select a title for the exhibition, and now to crowdsource the works to be featured in the exhibition. Both interactive and inclusive, it’s an inspiring project for our time.
R E L A T E D . M A T E R I A L S
• Walters Art Museum / Wikimedia Press Release
• The Walters Art Museum Website
• Opening 17 June, the community curated exhibition, Public Property
• Public Property “Photocracy” page where the exhibition’s curation is crowdsourced
experience
That is such amazing news! Organisations like this are role models for how things should be. Here’s hoping places like the Tate sit up and take notice.
Yes Rowan, it’s such a lovely piece of news!
I think Libraries are deepest into their new-century identity crisis. So much of what they once did has been largely replaced by online media. Yet what makes this crisis time such an exciting time for the library is that while IDK if anyone “knows” exactly what a 21st century library is “supposed to be” there seems to be a loud chorus of voices that whatever the library is in the process of becoming, whatever isn’t so important any more, that we really, really want the library to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
By comparison, the Museum does have more specific holdings and perhaps mission than the library. Still, these cultural institutions have already seen that their “membership” today has a far wider geographic radius than it ever did in the 20th century, and that unlike that century, today many museum “members” will rarely, or perhaps even never, come to the physical institution. It’s exciting to see The Walters Art Museum try to find a way to bring 55 centuries of human art history into the 21st century.
Following the Library and the Museum, I think the University must be next. While many universities say they’re changing so much, the often seem more the same than different to me. They have a sort of lock on the “education industry” and certainly they’ve done well. Yet with the simultaneous empowerment of the Internet, and enslavement of skyrocketing tuition, it seems that the unstable foundation of this institution that means so much to us, must be primed for so many changes in our century.