1st of January is the international Public Domain day. This means that works of arts, literature, philosophy and related fields, which have served the copyright period of respective countries are available for free in the public domain.
This year we were excited to see that Jamini Roy’s works, 50 years post his death, as per the Indian copyright laws, were available in public domain.
Which set us thinking about the importance of access to artworks for the public and its current state in India.
As an example, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi boasts of approximately 17,000 artworks in its collection (as per its website). A quick browse of the various categories listed, shows a handful of images of poor resolution with no details or information about the works. The information on NGMA in Mumbai is even more woefully inadequate, and we could not get an understanding of the scope or periods of artworks in its collection.
KNMA in New Delhi, one of most exclusive and expansive private collections in India, exhibiting some of the most well-curated shows also does not have a strong digital access.
These institutions are India’s premier art repositories funded by the government and private agencies. The availability of images and detailed information on collections for other State museums is even more paltry.
Interestingly, the National Portal & Digital Repository, a digital enterprise by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, has collated the collections of eleven national and regional museums of India. However, these do not list the entire extent of collections, and furthermore, the quality of images and access to detailed information is limited, with no cross reference of artists and works across the listed collections.
Why does this incense us and what is the importance of having images and information available in the public domain?
We have written in the past about the meagre attention art receives in India. A large part of this is due to inadequate resource centres and availability of digital information. This comes from the basic premise that the more people know and understand any particular topic, the more they would engage with it.
For Indian art, unfortunately, this has been held in very close quarters, which gets reflected in the small number of museums, galleries, public and private institutions devoted to the arts in the country, which boasts of one of the largest populations, a booming economy and the one of fastest growing HNI population.
All these factors contribute to the negligible size of the Indian art market.
Which brings us back to availability of images and information about artworks in the public domain.
Why do public and private institutions not invest in the resources to make their collections accessible? We have sometimes heard the argument regarding ‘misuse of information’. We have tried to get our heads around it but so far not found this to be a substantial explanation. What does it mean to ‘misuse’ images? These are artworks in a public collection. Most of which would be outside of the copyright restrictions, and by law should be available.
The other argument to support ready access is that Indian art market, particularly, has been battling the curse of fakes, especially for the high-selling well-known artists and artworks. In this case, unless people (buyers, sellers, enthusiasts, researchers, academics etc) have a compendium of artworks of respective artists it becomes very difficult to ascertain whether an artwork is rightfully from a particular artist’s body of work, making it easier for forgeries to proliferate.
Information and understanding, hence goes a long way in both expanding the market and mitigating the prevalence of fakes.
In the second part of this discourse, we will write about how and why AI generated art, and the plethora of AI websites is going to make this an even more urgent and imperative task for museums across the world.
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