Yale Center for British Art
Stubbs’ Lion Attacking A Horse.
When Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of art collections and head of collections at the Yale Center for British Art, turned on his television screen to watch an episode of 30 Rock, he wasn’t expecting to be reminded of work. He’d already put in a long day at the office; now he was hoping to get away from it.
But as the second season’s 19th episode, which takes place at Christie’s Auction House in New York City, unfolded, Hargraves saw a familiar sight: a copy of George Stubbs’ Lion Attacking A Horse, the real version of which held a privileged spot in the Center’s library court.
Was he surprised? Sure. But he didn’t need to worry about copyright infringement. He’d overseen the process making that image, and thousands of others, accessible. Now he was watching the results.
Stubbs Zebra. .
Hargraves, with other professionals at the Center for British Art and at Yale, is part of an effort to make tens of thousands of academic and museum images free for the public’s use before the Center reopens in May. In January, the museum released more than 22,000 images onto the website and into the public domain. Before May, that number will grow even more. The effort involves keeping track of what images enter the public domain each year, as the center decides how accessible it wants its collection ultimately to be.
“I think it all really goes back to finding a way to make British art exciting, accessible, free, and open to the public,” Hargraves said. “Paul Mellon [an Anglophile who donated his huge collection to jumpstart the center in 1966] was very clear that he wanted this to be a collection for teachers, students, and the general public. We hope that people will take an image and use it. It’s an extension of our mission statement.”
William Blake’s The Horse.
For him and YBCA Manager of Imaging, Rights, and Reproductions Melissa Fournier, that means the entire public — not just Yale students, professors, and academics interested in illustrating their manuscripts and lectures. “When we launched, we didn’t want to deter anyone,” Hargraves said. “That’s what we want to encourage … use in a completely non-British Art way.” Academics still use the bulk of the images. But there is, he said, a distinct “pleasure finding our images showing up in unexpected places.”
In the past years, that has included use of Stubbs’ zebra as a commercial folding screen, 10 cameos of works on Oprah’s website, and mock decor for Alec Baldwn’s office on 30 Rock.
It’s part of a greater trend in sharing art that museums, staring down those black holes that are the digital divide and a generation interested in accessibility rather than ownership, have begun to embrace. Once Hargraves, Fournier, and other staff at the center deem an object ready for open access, it can travel without restriction — and sometimes does. That means zero fees for authorization, application, or distribution of the image. Because they have embedded metadata, the images are still trackable as they travel the web — but the center (like their neighbors across the street) don’t put restrictions on them.
Thomas Stothard’s An Unfinished Study of Venus and Adonis.
”I think there’s a future when our resources are really going to be out there on the web, without context,” said Hargraves. This is a way to get ahead of it.