San Diego’s Civic Arts Collection

It’s no surprise that art museums would view making their collections available via a CC0 license to be a natural next step in evolving a web presence; the Art Institute of Chicago, after all, has had a website since 1995. But art museums aren’t the only places with extensive collections. Moreover, sometimes a collection exists within a context that doesn’t really have an obvious place for promoting and handling artwork, such as the civic art collection put online by the city of San Diego.

The City of San Diego launched its Civic Art Collection website (sdcivicartcollection.com/portals/civic-art-collection) in early November 2018. The online collection contains more than 800 items.

Unlike the art collection of a museum or other institution, San Diego’s artworks are scattered all over the city. When ex ploring the site, you see collections of sculptures indoors as well as decorations on the outside of buildings. You see whimsical benches and more traditional paintings and artworks.

The site does a good job, for the most part, of providing infor mation on its artworks. In a couple of cases I wish there was more integration with outside sources, with information flowing both ways. For example, one of the artworks on the site is by African-American artist Eddie L. Edwards, who died in 2007.

The biography of the artist is useful and would be even more useful repurposed as a Wikipedia article. (Edwards does not have a Wikipedia page.) Conversely, there is additional information about him in the African American Visual Artists Database (AAVAD; 216.197.120.164/artistbibliog.cfm?id=4787) that is not on the artwork page. A flow of information into and out of this site would benefit all of us.

The entire site has the feel of a closed ecosystem. Unlike The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, all images on the San Di ego Civil Art Collection site are under copyright, even those of public domain works. “The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture is committed to making the collection data available for public access,” City of San Diego senior public information officer Racquel Vasquez told me. “To date, we have a web interface for the public to search the collection and have made the dataset available to download for free. We will be exploring additional options to share the collection, resources and information on other platforms to expand its accessibility in the future.”

That doesn’t stop it from being eminently browsable; works can be explored in a variety of ways, from a map of San Diego to recent acquisitions, featured sites, and dozens of different search parameters.

Inside Bruegel

The San Diego Civic Art Collection takes a literally wide spread collection of artworks and organizes them into a single site with multiple viewing options. Another recent online art project took almost the exact opposite tack; one artist is examined very, very closely.

Inside Bruegel (insidebruegel.net) is an exploration of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings that are held at Kunsthis torisches Museum in Vienna. Bruegel’s paintings are full of detail and viewable on this site in a way that they wouldn’t be viewable even if you were at the museum standing 2 inches from them.

There are 11 paintings covered here (with an additional one coming soon). Each of them has four viewing options: macrophotography, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectog raphy, and x-radiography. (If you’re not familiar with these techniques, check out the Imaging Methods link on the site.) The most compelling view to me is macrophotography, which allows you to zoom in incredibly closely on the paintings. Not only can you get a better view of foreground characters, you can take a look at background figures, even the ones who are at a peasant dance but look more like they wish they’d stayed home and binge-watched Netflix.

The other viewing methods highlight additional aspects of the paintings; infrared reflectography renders the paintings in black and white and lets you appreciate the detailed finger ing of a musical instrument or the way painted hands wrap around the handle of a jug.

Although 11 paintings don’t sound like a lot of content, you could easily spend hours here because of the many views available of the art and the plain fact that the paintings are fascinating.

Being able to see what centuries-old, X-rayed paintings look like feels like the 21st-century internet. It’s cutting edge; it’s an experience with the artwork you would not be able to have even at a museum; it’s in-depth access to resources that, if you’re in the United States, are thousands of miles away.

LACMA and Collator

If this kind of tech is available to bring art to visitors in a unique way, why would you do anything less? Why would you do something that conversely seems absolutely vintage, like … a book? Maybe because it lets users customize their experience.

In June 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) teamed up with Hyundai Motor to beta-launch a project called Collator (collator.lacma.org). The site lets visitors assemble their own collection of LACMA artworks into a print-on-d emand book. (There are also museum-curated collections available for purchase.)

LACMA publisher Lisa Mark told me the public response to the project has been “great.” She elaborated: “People are excited to see this innovation as many of our visitors appar ently harbor a fantasy about making their own exhibition catalog. It’s fun to pick and choose works from LACMA’s collections based on a theme or concept that you yourself cre ate—even if it’s as simple as assembling all the objects you can find in your favorite color or as complex as creating a book that allows you to meditate on cross-cultural approaches to figuration in painting.”

There are more than 1,100 images to choose from, presented in a sprawling scrolling cacophony. Items can be sorted by art ist or title, or searched by keyword. I had no idea what to look for so I searched for birds .

There weren’t too many results available, but one of them was Toshio Aoki’s marvelous Woman with Birds. (I had to go outside LACMA to learn more about Aoki since LACMA’s detail pages are not as rich as those of The Met or the Art Institute of Chicago.) Searching for bird-related keywords (wings, bird, flying, etc.), I put together a modest little book. LACMA encouraged me to make a dedication and select a cover. Soon I had a screen full of a potential book.

If I wanted to, I could order the book and have it printed and shipped to me. (Unfortunately, this is only available in the United States.)

There isn’t enough information on the individual artworks to make this a way to learn about art. It would be a great way to capture the images from LACMA you found most compel ling, or to create a “dream book” of aspirations and things you like. I found myself wanting to apply this book technology to the Bruegel site to save close-ups and details I found particularly interesting

Collator not only lets visitors interact with LACMA’s collection in a unique way, but it’s also giving the museum feedback on image popularity. “We are definitely tracking what’s popular and trying to give people as many of their favorites as we can,” according to Mark. “As far as IRL [in real life] acquisi tions, those are driven by curatorial concerns and availability but LACMA’s curators have certainly been interested in knowing what the public chooses to put in their books.”

Whether it’s making huge art collections available easily for use across the web, or delving so deeply into a mere 11 paintings that a visitor can get lost in them, art museums and other institutions are pushing further what it means to have collections on the web. I hope I can revisit this topic in a couple of years and add in XR (eXtended reality) and VR (virtual reality) experiences.