I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?
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.
Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.
A lot of them have the majority of their collections offsite in warehouses. The "museum" is a sort of front office meant for visitors, but visitors only ever see a tiny fraction of the collection.
"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.
Not exactly. If this was the sole goal then there wouldn’t be a museum at all.
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
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.
shermantanktop · · focus · HN ↗
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
jhbadger · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
It would be a warehouse without public access.
shermantanktop · · focus · HN ↗
jhbadger · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.
The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.