I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.

A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.

I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.

Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.

What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.

I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.

Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.

There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.

Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.

Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.

So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.

Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.

https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...

I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.

I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here

After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.

It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....

Nicely summarized by another commentator:

“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.

If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”

To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.

From my perspective, having high resolution scans or even 3D scans could undermine the role of the museums. Their role is to provide the best environment to view, to experience and to appreciate the works of the artists. A casual viewing at home, from a computer cannot provide that optimal experience and almost certainly will reduce the wish to visit the museum in person. Much like a recording of a concert or an opera cannot replace a in-person experience but (unfortunately?) is the default way for pop music. Much of that experience is how we mentally, emotionally and physically prepared ourselves for the experience.

Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.

PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.

If you know french bureaucracy, it is very simple in the end. It is a public worker that is nominated as the head of the museum. The mindset is almost never to do their job well or benefit the common good. But to be important and showing your importance by abusing your power if necessary to show that you have some.

Somehow he thinks that the sculpture is his own as he is the custodian, and so that he has all rights. And pictures or 3d scans in the end belongs to him also, like if the virtual thing was a physical item locked in the museum.

If he is forced to release publicly the 3d scan, especially against his goodwill, it is like being striped of his power and authority so he couldn't allow that. It becomes a personal matter.

The only thing that could have worked is to befriend him or create a cultural organisation and have lobbied to him in the first place that he would learned a lot of reputation/marketing points by releasing it. Imagine a dedicated website and grand champagne event with the incompetent minister of culture where they push the button...

Maybe it’s about the precedent and the government didn’t want to have to publish raw data on everything they have so they made sure to win this one?

Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…

Because they are snobby gatekeepers who think making art more accessible would dilute their value. These sorts are very common in the art and academia world.