�

Cover: T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, installation for The Eternal Frame (detail), 1976, mixed media, Long Beach Museum of Art. Pictured are artists Jody Procter (left) and Chip Lord (right), and Doug Hall on screen as the “artist-president.” The Eternal Frame installation will be re-created for the Getty’s California Video exhibition in 2008. See p. 22.© 1976 T. R. Uthco/Ant Farm

co

nt

en

ts

2

4

9

10

16

22

29

33

34

36

Director’s StatementThomas Crow on the Villa scholars program in its second year

Ancient “Identity Theft”Erich S. Gruen takes a closer look at stereotypes and subversion among the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean

Acquisition FocusClaire L. Lyons finds inspiration in Pierre Trémaux’s Exploration archéologique

From Salvation to EmpowermentJan N. Bremmer’s European notes on contemporary American religion

The Cultural CommonsThomas Moritz evaluates democracy and digital progress

Screen TestJessica Kedward-Sánchez on the future of video art at the Getty

EndNotesPublications, recent acquisitions, exhibitions

TributeHerbert Henri Eduard Hymans, 19�5–�007

Editor’s PostscriptCarolyn Gray Anderson on taking risks

GiftsResearch Library Council acquisitions

First Draft, The Newsletter of the Getty Research Institute, No. 6

7

24

Arts and humanities institutions—and, specifically, the “memory institutions”1: libraries, archives, and museums—exist in a larger cultural and political context. Those of us who have spent most of our professional lives in such institutions may too easily lapse into a narrowed, self-referential mindset, forgetting that we have both effects and obligations in that larger world.

The Cultural Commons

Democracy and Digital Progress

b y T h O � A s � O R I T � T h O � A s � O R I T �

1�

17

a few days in Pakistan, I felt some shock looking at those images

and hearing those sounds, aware of the grating contrast with

the culture outside the shop doors. A few days later I wandered

the streets of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province,

then, as now, a center for Taliban activity. The fundamentalist

madrassahs were well stocked with religious texts,5 while no

media shops were apparent and the library shelves of the local

university were quite empty.

The resources that compose the fabric of our cultural

lives—that we often take for granted in Los Angeles and at the

Getty—were not available to most in Pakistan, whether in the

“traditional” form of books, journals, and newspapers; or galleries,

lectures, concerts, cultural dialogues, films, videos; or the more

“contemporary” forms of Web-based digital media.

Today, even in the wilds of Topanga Canyon, I receive e-mail,

phone service, newspapers (from Europe, North America, Asia),

journals and books, TV, FM radio, and much more directly over

the Internet. In Pakistan today, and throughout most of the devel-

oping world (“cyber-universe” notwithstanding), such resources

are available only to a small and privileged elite.�

For more than twenty years I have been given opportunities

to travel worldwide, primarily seeking better ways to share our

common knowledge of the natural world in support of environ-

mental conservation. I have become more and more sensitized

to the ways that the United States is represented internationally

and to the ways that we encourage others to understand us.

Whether in passing gringada jokes and comments or in news-

papers and media broadcasts, we are often, at best, parodied

as well-meaning but clumsily destructive caricatures in our own

situation comedy. Again and again we seem to flaunt what is

least estimable in our society and culture.

Toward a Global Digital CommonsIn 1�07, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The field of knowledge is the

common property of all mankind.”7

Jefferson was not naively expressing a utopian vision. He

clearly understood the practical implications of his proposition (in

the 1790s he noted the importance of preservation of knowledge

by the provision and maintenance of multiple copies of texts).

The compromises concerning copyright and patent codified in

the U.S. Constitution reflect the wisdom of this Jeffersonian

view. Many have attributed the notable successes of American

culture and economy to the wise balance the Founding Fathers

Although not always well appreciated, a strong and inex-

tricable link exists between the fundamental mission of our

cultural institutions and a common ethical imperative to nurture

and secure tolerant, secular democracy.� The mission of most

such institutions—whether explicitly or implicitly—focuses on

the creation and sharing of knowledge for the common good. In

this regard, the mission of the J. Paul Getty Trust is both expansive

and exacting. The original Trust Indenture of 195� requires “the

diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.” A more recent

expression states: “The Getty focuses on the visual arts in all of

their dimensions and their capacity to strengthen and inspire

aesthetic and humanistic values . . . with the conviction that

cultural enlightenment and community involvement in the arts

can help lead to a more civil society”� (emphasis mine).

Without launching a complex epistemological digression,

it seems useful to note that “diffusion of knowledge” implies

more than the simple dissemination of conventional products

or expressions of knowledge, as in books, articles, or exhibits.

“Diffusion of knowledge” also implies nurturing, developing,

and sharing knowledge of the process and practices by which

knowledge is developed and created. With respect to the Getty’s

mission, this means close awareness, systematic documenting,

and open sharing of the methods of critical scholarly practice

and discourse by which we come to understand the intelligence

of art. Arguably, a primary defining feature of this historic era will

be the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the underlying

powerful technologies that have enabled them. Only the revo-

lutions in genomics and nuclear physics seem capable of rivaling

them. If, as much of our recent history suggests, advocacy for

secular, rational, tolerant democracy is a primary goal of this

historic era, I believe that cultural institutions must reconsider our

mission in the context of the powerful, convergent technologies

that have created the Web, with its demonstrated potential for

building networks that are truly global both in reach and

comprehensiveness.

We must reconsider how our mission-consistent “content”

is now distributed and licensed for use—both conventionally

and on the Web. As a culture and as a society, we must make far

more serious investments in developing and sharing globally

the very best elements of our artistic and humanistic culture.�

Some Observations from the FieldIn October 199�, I walked into a video shop in the upscale Clifton

neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan. The walls were filled with

Hollywood posters of Rambo, armed to the teeth, and with re-

vealing pictures of distressed actresses in distressed garments.

The bootleg tape shop down the street offered the predictable

array of music, some Asian but mostly Western pop. After only

Facing page: Detail of a hand-colored engraving of a lead/tin wire’s reaction to electricity in Martinus van Marum, Beschreibung einer ungemein grossen Elektrisier-Maschine (Leipzig, 1786–1798), pl. 9. In this plate, Marum shows one of many phases of the fine lines created though a wire’s contact with a large amount of electricity generated by a machine of his own invention.2675-394

17

1�

Sadly, it has been a dominant and simplistic fallacy of this

political-economic era that, as a single article of faith, somehow

the market can fully support the costs of fulfilling mission, thereby

producing a more civil society. In the 1990s, I often heard the

mantra “No margin [e.g., revenues], no mission.” However, this

assumption is a relatively recent phenomenon. One need only

look to the burgeoning of the arts through public sector support

since the 19�0s. And my personal experiences in Pakistan and

throughout the developing world suggest that sole reliance on

“the market” will not successfully meet the challenge of building

strong and vibrant democratic societies.9 Public investment and

appropriate provisions in law to insure parity of access and use

have made essential contributions to the continued vitality of the

American experiment.

In the past twenty-five years, inadequacies of support both

from the public sector and the philanthropic sector have too

often forced a resort to market-based fees for provision of basic

mission-defined resources and services—and, most particularly,

for publications, whether traditional printed publications or

digital resources. (I will note here that print/paper and digital

formats do not pose exclusive alternatives. They represent parts

of a spectrum of choices that can contribute to diffusion of

knowledge.)

The Web?It is both a premise and a promise of the World Wide Web that

“information wants to be free.”10 But, while Stewart Brand’s

challenge, issued in 19�� at the first Hackers Conference, may

be compelling, information, irrespective of format, inescapably

carries real costs (and in some instances it can command signifi-

cant revenues).

Surveying the early history of the Web, it seems clear that the

Web has become an unprecedented, rich venue for democratic

discourse and individual expression (as well as for marginalia

and graffiti), but it has not yet fulfilled its promise of egalitarian

access to resources like contemporary books and journals11—

media for which dissemination traditionally has been dependent

achieved between incentives to authors and inventors for their

creations and innovations, and the reversion of these “products”

to the public domain for free public use—including commercial

application.

This equilibrium between recognition of and compensation

for novelty and the requirement for sharing is also reflected in

the observations of philosophers of science. Robert K. Merton

noted that, given the accretive nature of science (and, at least by

implication, of human culture), uniquely original contributions

to the common fund of knowledge are necessarily quite limited.�

The American public library and the tradition of public

library services—as Andrew Carnegie and many, many other

distinguished Americans have realized—is a direct institutional

expression of the Jeffersonian ethic respecting our common

fund of knowledge (as is, in fact, the strong and vibrant tradition

of American publishing). And the broader tradition of great

public museums and allied cultural institutions is fully resonant

with that tradition.

We proudly note that the Getty, taken as a whole, is a

tremendously productive cultural center. We produce a rich and

various array of cultural services and resources ranging from the

glamorous (exhibits and events) to the utilitarian (conservation

techniques, bibliographies, and vocabularies); but all these efforts

make valuable contributions to the cultural commons and stand

in useful contrast to the entertainments with which America so

abundantly supplies itself and the world.

In this context, it is important to note that the capacity of

the cultural community to make contributions is based on a tax-

exempt status that is, significantly, a form of social investment

amounting to many billions of dollars. The intended missions of

cultural institutions are the definitive basis of their tax exemption;

thus, tax exemption is a form of social contract, not an entitle-

ment, institutionally or personally.

Above: Ilene Segalove, What Is Business? (detail), 1982, single-channel color video, 29 min. Segalove’s work will appear in the 2008 Getty exhibition California Video.© Ilene Segalove

Facing page: William Wegman, To the New Gallery, 1993, colored ink on paper (recent acquisition).© William Wegman 2007.M.1

As directions for an imaginary performance that marks the Holly Solomon Gallery’s move from Fifth Avenue to SoHo in New York, Wegman’s map speaks more to the process of making one’s way around the city and knowing the important turns to make on certain streets (or perhaps not) than to providing effective locational information. Thus, Wegman disseminates way-finding information that yields a cache of knowledge not limited to the ostensible destination.

�0

P u b l I C O R P e R I s h

Brewster Kahle, head of the San Francisco-based

Internet Archive, insists that it is decidedly within

our grasp to provide universal access to knowl-

edge. Kahle and his team archive an average of

thirteen terabytes of digitized information every

month, from online material such as expired Web

pages to music, film, books, and images. Success-

fully securing funding for their project, they have

established that to scan, make universally avail-

able, and permanently archive any book costs

around thirty dollars—a surprisingly economical

endeavor. Like Tom Moritz, Kahle warns that we

must not allow the thirty percent of the project

that’s troublesome to interfere with digitization

of the other seventy percent. Seeing no reason

that every book ever published can’t very soon

be made available online, Kahle observes of the

vast numbers of books being written in the world,

“At most it’s six billion people typing at sixty

words per minute, twenty-four hours a day. It’s

not that much text!” A rare and refreshingly

undaunted perspective.

Check it out:www.archive.org

Above left: Brewster Kahle (right), director and cofounder of the Internet Archive, shows Peter Bruce, director general and chief technology officer of Library and Archives Canada, some features of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It can be used to surf 85 billion Web pages, including billions archived since 1996 and no longer searchable on the Internet.

Above right: Each of the Internet Archive’s racks of data storage holds up to one hundred terabytes of digitized content. They measure six feet tall by two feet wide and weigh about a ton.

upon conventional market models. If we as a society can agree

on the necessity of providing global access to knowledge, our

dilemma is then how to meet costs with the same urgency that

we have too often directed at less worthy goals.

In �00� Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan reflected

upon the economic experience of the 1990s and diagnosed an

“infectious greed” that afflicted the American business com-

munity.1� He did not extend his diagnosis to the cultural realm;

but, arguably, the conspicuous failure of support for our cultural

institutions and the consequent forced adoption by those

institutions of revenue-producing barriers to access can be

understood as extended symptoms of that infection.

A Cultural Commons?To date, the global science community has made remarkable

progress toward free and open access to scientific-knowledge

resources. Initiatives such as GenBank, the Global Biodiversity

Information Facility (GBIF), PubMed, and many others demonstrate

the effectiveness and utility of free and open access. But we have

not made comparable progress in the arts and humanities.

I believe that it is the sum of our informed, rational discourse

in the arts, sciences, and humanities that makes the strongest and

most compelling argument for modeling an open secular society

and for the continued progress of democratic innovation.

An extremely narrow spectrum of religious and sectarian

texts is easily and widely available worldwide—in Pakistan and

America—but the intelligence, insight, and wisdom of our secular

culture (perhaps most important, the dynamic and critical discourse

by which “knowledge” is democratically tested) are systematically

restricted. I want to propose that we must strategically and

systematically make our knowledge available for global access

and use. With focused public and private sector investments

in digitization, and with open and free diffusion, we have the

potential to make enormous contributions to the establishment

and securing of secular democracy. Cultural memory institutions

have a unique opportunity to lead such efforts.1�

We must no longer permit the trailing edge of our culture—

the Web as Times Square—to be pervasively available while

continuing to tolerate barriers to access for the best of our culture.

We must not continue to sustain models that contribute to market

failure by which the most deserving, the most deprived members

of our global society are denied access.

We must reconsider legal restrictions based in extremely

narrow and overreaching interpretations of “intellectual property”

and primarily driven by the special interests of the entertainment

industries. All stakeholders must be willing to be good corporate

citizens and to make modest concessions for the common good.

In the United States, we make minimal investment of public

N O T E S

1 Lorcan Dempsey, et al., “Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: A Shared Approach,”

Ariadne 22 (1999), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/ (accessed March 18,

2007).

2 In the current era, John Rawls’s concept of “Justice as Fairness” perhaps best captures

the force of this imperative. For a succinct summary, see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/

original-position/ (accessed March 18, 2007).

3 In 1953 the J. Paul Getty Trust was still known as the J. Paul Getty Museum. The

original Indenture is posted at http://www.getty.edu/about/governance/indenture.html

(accessed July 11, 2007) and the Getty’s current mission statement is posted at http://

www.getty.edu/about/governance/mission_statement.html (accessed July 11, 2007).

4 The decades-long history of U.S. Information Agency Libraries and Information Centers

worldwide suggests that this imperative has been strongly recognized in previous eras.

5 P. W. Singer, Pakistan’s Madrassahs: Ensuring a System of Education Not Jihad,

Brookings Analysis Paper 14, November 2001, http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/

singer/20020103.pdf (accessed April 3, 2007).

6 I might add that recently when I gave a talk in Albany, New York, it was pointed out

to me that communities just one hundred miles north of us in the Adirondacks suffered

some of the same deprivations as those in Pakistan.

7 Thomas Jefferson to Henry Dearborn (United States Secretary of War), June 22, 1807,

http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff11.txt (accessed April 3, 2007).

8 “The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are

assigned to the community. They constitute a common heritage in which the equity of

the individual producer is severely limited.” Robert K. Merton, “A Note on Science

and Democracy,” Journal of Law and Political Sociology 1 (1942): 121. This notion is

obviously controversial and, particularly in the humanities, scholars seem inextricably

wedded to the value of individual distinction. In the arts, the individual creative act is

almost universally recognized as essential.

9 As but one example, I am aware of a situation in which a national museum in a

Latin American country was told by a tax-exempt publisher of an electronic resource

that the annual licensing fee would amount to $85,000 (USD). The cost would have

been prohibitive were it $850 and, moreover, with this type of digital resource, addi-

tional increments of use are nonrivalrous and impose virtually zero additional cost to

the provider.

10 “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information

wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—

too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable

to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about

price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because

each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” Stewart Brand, The

Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking, 1987), 202.

11 “Figures released by the largest publisher of scientific journals—Amsterdam-based

Elsevier—help explain why many scientists and others are frustrated. Its 1,700 journals,

which produce $1.6 billion in revenue, garner a remarkable 30 percent profit margin.

‘I do realize that the 30 percent sticks out,’ Elsevier Vice President Pieter Bolman said.

‘But what we still do feel—and this is, I think, where the real measure is—we’re still

very much in the top of author satisfaction and reader satisfaction.’” Rick Weiss, “A Fight

for Free Access to Medical Research: Online Plan Challenges Publishers’ Dominance,”

Washington Post, August 5, 2003, A01.

12 Testimony of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan before the Senate

Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Federal Reserve Board’s Semiannual

Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, 107th Cong., 2nd. sess., July 16, 2002. See

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/2002/july/testimony.htm (accessed April 3, 2007).

13 The American Museum of Natural History made its complete legacy of scientific

publications freely available on the Web in January 2005: http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/

dspace/statistics (accessed April 3, 2007). In the first year of availability, nearly 500,000

successful downloads occurred.

14 Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book! What Will Happen to Books? Reader, Take Heart!

Publisher, Be Very, Very Afraid. Internet Search Engines Will Set Them Free. A Manifesto,”

http://www.kk.org/writings/scan_this_book.php (accessed April 3, 2007).

funds in digital capture and provision of access to knowledge

resources. We must, in our common interest, build and secure a

global knowledge commons based on principles of fair access

and responsible use.

In making these assertions, I assume that all contributors to

our culture, particularly scholars, authors, editors, publishers,

booksellers, and librarians, have always had common cause.

Recent divisive arguments—as, for example, between publishers

and librarians—may derive primarily from differences in our

relative familiarity with and capacity to understand and adapt

to the challenges of the Internet environment. For all of us, there

have been difficulties in disentangling ourselves from exclusive

dependence on market models; but this has been much easier

for librarians than for commercial publishers and sectors of the

film and recording industries.

There may be a “culture war” going on. But the struggle is

being waged not merely at a distance on the Op-Ed pages of the

New York Times. And it is not a reflexive red-blue disagreement

between Republicans and Democrats—or, for that matter, be-

tween librarians, authors, and publishers. Rather, the struggle

exists between those who intend closed, privileged, authoritarian

societies and those who advocate for open, tolerant, academi-

cally free, secular democracies. It is our challenge as a culture

to analyze closely the “conflict of business models”1� and to

resolve the “clash” by developing fair compensation for those

with legitimate stakes, while eliminating barriers to access and

use. Thomas Jefferson would have confirmed this mission.

Thomas Moritz is associate director of administration

and chief of knowledge management at the GRI.

ethically, all but the most mercantile of cultural knowledge workers have a common mission: the widest possible dissemination of knowledge for the continued benefit of all. We must not fail to use every effective means at our disposal to provide for all our common heritage of human knowledge.

�1