alt Hacker NewsI 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
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I had the same experience. Museums really want to keep the pictures locked up. Profit and ego
>I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
Weird that anyone would care, since most of those works are presumably public domain. Is it not the legal right, in most of the Western world, of the public to reproduce such works, let alone to use them as elements in their own work?
I wonder if this will change now that camera-enabled glasses are becoming more common.
> I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
I doubt it. How much merchandise relies on high quality 3D scans?
I think the real reason is that a lot of people are naturally paranoid control freaks. Their instinct is that these scans should be secret and they never really think beyond that.
The exceptional Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum: "We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have, are, in a way, everyone’s property… With the internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image from the Rijksmueum rather than using a very bad reproduction… If they want to have a Vermeer on their toilet paper, I’d rather have a very high-quality image of Vermeer on toilet paper than a very bad reproduction."
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-...