Here Be (Naughty) Dragons: Recommendations for Digitizing Explicit Art
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Dilemmas in Web Publishing: Should Museums Censor Their Digital Collections? Museum professionals discuss personal and institutional conflicts that arise when unsavory/offensive collections are made accessible to the public via public digitization projects. Learn about the inherent conflict between public access to some collections and institutional control of its image and message. MAAM 2016.
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Here Be (Naughty) Dragons: Recommendations for Digitizing Explicit Art
- 1. Here Be (Naughty) Dragons Jessica Milby Assistant Director for Collection Information Recommendations for Digitizing Explicit Art
- 2. The following slides show works of art that are sexually explicit, including photography and some anatomy- defying depictions in prints.
- 3. Chris Ofili The Holy Virgin Mary 1996 Private Collection Marcus Harvey Myra 1995 Private Collection Sensation:Young BritishArtists from the Saatchi Collection, 1999-2000, Brooklyn Museum
- 4. An Encyclopedic Collection 240,000 collection objects 118,510 online
- 5. You are not your audience.
- 6. Ice Cream Evelyne Axell 1964 Collection of Serge Goisse, Belgium “International Pop” exhibition image censored by Facebook for being too suggestive.
- 7. Trailer Camp Children, Richmond, California Ansel Adams 1944 Please won’t someone think of the children?!?! Art should challenge, but as a public institution, we should take into consideration the kinds of thoughts that we provoke and the feelings that we generate in the communities we serve or hope to serve.
- 8. Anyone can be… insulted hurt offended …and in parallel… challenged moved enlightened BY ANYTHING, by the same thing.
- 9. When you choose not to publish, consider that you are silencing/censoring the artist. Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) Barbara Kruger, Printed by Derrière L'Etoile Studios, New York, Published by Peter Blum Edition, New York 1985 the secret sharerer From the series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters Kara Walker, Printed by Burnet Editions, New York 2010
- 11. Joost and Friede, La Jenny, France, 2002 Jock Sturges 2002 Man Nude on Bed, Las Vegas Zoe Strauss, Printed by Philadelphia Photo Arts Center 2005 (image); 2011 (print) Naked Man Arrested by Two Police Officers Charles Gatewood 1973 Photographs made public without discussion. Female Nude at Mirror Artist/maker unknown, French? c. 1870-1900 Points for consideration: medium of the work
- 12. Couple in Front of Painted Screen From the series Contest of Twelve Poems (Jūni-Kyoka Uta Kassen) (Shunga) Attributed to Isoda Koryūsai Edo Period (1615-1868), 1772-1774 Couple by Kotatsu (Shunga) From the series The Thread Connecting Modern Lovers (Imayo Irokumi no Ito) Attributed to Katsukawa Shunchō Edo Period (1615-1868) Couple with Tray of Refreshments (Shunga) From the album Komachi-biki Kitagawa Utamaro I Edo Period (1615-1868), 1802 Prints made public without discussion. Points for consideration: medium of the work content/what is depicted
- 13. Couple (no. 2) Emil Ganso 1920s-1930s Couple (no. 1) Emil Ganso 1920s-1930s Couple (no. 1) Emil Ganso 1920s-1930s Prints made public after discussion. Points for consideration: medium of the work content/what is depicted importance of the works to the study of the artist, movement, medium
- 14. John Palmer Family Album Andy Warhol June 1969 Unidentified Man Family Album Andy Warhol April 1969 Brigid Berlin Family Album Andy Warhol April 1969 Photographs made public after discussion. Points for consideration: medium of the work content/what is depicted importance of the works to the study of the artist content/who is depicted
- 15. Have backup in the form of policy.
- 16. The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) Bruce Nauman 1967 Open Access Policy Example: [Institution] is committed to making our collections and resources available for illustration and use by the public for educational purposes without restriction.
- 17. Tattooed Penises, Philadelphia Zoe Strauss, Printed by Philadelphia Photo Arts 2008 (image); 2011 (print) Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) Marcel Duchamp 1912 less than 30 pageviews over 220,000 pageviews What happens when the !%^$#s go public.
- 19. Almost 800 “nudes” online
- 20. Scott David Lebe 1995 (negative); 1995 (print) Photographs not made public after discussion. “For me the photographs from 1989 were a reaffirmation of life, a start out of the withdrawal that had come with the shock of AIDS. The Scott photographs in the years that followed were all really more of the same. They are about, in part, the refusal to give up on life or on life's pleasures. A triumph of a spirit over AIDS.” David Lebe, 2013 Scott David Lebe 1989 (negative); 1989 (print)
- 22. Prometheus Bound Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders Begun c. 1611-1612, completed by If your metadata says that the image is explicit, you’ve set yourself up. If your image is explicit, and someone stumbles onto it unexpectedly, you’ve set yourself up.
- 23. Proceed with... caution. careful thought. transparency.
- 24. Money Scales and Four Weights Artist/maker unknown, English 1751-1756 Balance open access with consideration for your audience. Document conversations and steps taken. Contextualize works with sensitive, meaningful interpretation.
- 25. 1. You are not your audience. 2. You can’t predict what will offend. 3. Have backup. 4. Metadata matters. 5. Warnings might invite offense. 6. Proceed with caution.
- 26. ThankYou
Editor's Notes
- After I thought about this panel for a couple of months, I felt really kind of afraid to speak to this topic and walk into this minefield of censorship, trigger warnings, sensitivity, ethics and so on… I’m hoping that you can learn from my experience, that this will maybe save you some time and potentially help prepare you for a number of possible outcomes
- I’m going to focus on our conversations around works that might be considered sexually explicit that have been digitized and published or not published in our online collection—so much of the offensive potential of art is subjective, but many of these are obviously depicting sexual acts. There’s a lot of conflict around images of violence, images that employ racist caricatures, and I think the solutions I will present here can help if those types of art are your concern too. If you don’t want to see any of these things in art, please feel free to find another session. Also, I’ll be showing a number of works that the PMA has not published in our online collection, so I would appreciate if you would not take photos of the slides as I go through these.
- I’m not going to go into the history of the relationship between museums and controversy. If you want that, look at the exhibition Sensation and look at the reception of Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary in the UK vs. US. Then look at Marcus Harvey’s Myra and the way it was received in the UK vs. US. There’s lots to read. With Sensation…Chris Ofili’s piece offended in the US and not so much in the UK, and some of the US offense was in the service of political posturing. The reverse was the case for Myra by Marcus Harvey. The US audience didn’t have the context and so was not really concerned with Myra. Whereas the UK audience found it offensive. So for today, I don’t have all the answers, and this is not a complete map. We’re still navigating these issues at PMA.
- I’ve dealt with digitizing and publishing an encyclopedic collection—there’s a litt bit of everything in the collection being imaged, catalogued, and published. There have been a multitude of discussions addressing whether or not to publish certain works. There are certainly design solutions to consider, but we aren’t redesigning the entire site around a handful of objects. And we require an image to web publish an object, so those of you who don’t have that restriction, can of course publish the potentially objectionable object without an image and wash your hands of these testy conversations-- But I am convinced the conversations are worthwhile. Like with Sensation…context matters, and you don't get that without discussion. So, in context, this is personal, and subjective, and the individual matters, but you are not necessarily a good example of the reception of these works. Which brings me to my first point
- You are not your audience. Whether or not you find something offensive or potentially problematic is really anecdotal. You have to think beyond yourself and your colleagues, think about who you want to reach.
- We all learn our lessons the hard way sometimes. Facebook removed this image from the PMA page because of “suggestive content”, but we fought back. Curator Erica Battle: Ice Cream was chosen as a marketing image "because it speaks to so many themes found throughout Pop: consumption, pleasure, and seduction." So we thought it through clearly, but Facebook objected. Although we ultimately won and the image stayed up, this was not the response we expected, and it’s important to realize not only are you not your audience, but they are often looking through a lens like Facebook or other.
- Art should challenge, but as a public institution we should take into consideration the kinds of thoughts that we provoke, the feelings that we generate in the communities we serve or hope to serve. This conclusion came out of a conversation with Peter Barberie, our Curator of Photographs about some images I’ll show later in the presentation. Personally, I’d like to publish everything in the collection. But I’m a bit insensitive and hard to outrage. Again…I am not the audience.
- Anyone can be insulted, hurt, and offended AND in parallel challenged, moved, enlightened (sometimes at the same time) by basically anything, by the same thing. Some art is designed to offend, outrage, to call into question staid thinking. You can’t predict what will outrage someone. You can’t define the parameters of what will cause trouble. And you should be careful if you try to.
- Not publishing something can be viewed as silencing an opinion which will offend similarly to publishing the art object in question. So if you’re embarking on digitizing, publishing your collection, what are the works you should worry about? Everything?
- We are an art museum, our collections are art. Our branding won’t let you forget it. If you have something in the collections that isn’t art, should you not reconsider its place as part of the collection? That’s a vast oversimplification of the problem obviously, but it’s a question worth asking. It’s worth asking, not because the answer will be “it’s not art, deaccession it” but because the answer will be “this is WHY it’s art, this WHY we have it, this is WHY it’s important to history” and so on. The dialogue so far has been fascinating and unexpected.
- When I’m talking about discussion in these slides…I primarily mean a discussion between my staff responsible for making these records public and the curatorial staff who vet the cataloguing. In figuring out where works might raise concern: Consider the medium…photographic works are much more immediate and often have more potential to shock/offend. These photos weren’t discussed; they were just sent to the web. It’s just nudity after all.
- The Japanese shunga prints were published without any discussion with my team and the curator who approved them never really considered not sending them. We discussed it after the fact. They’re obviously graphic, but the anatomical exaggeration, I don’t know if that makes it worse or not, but the less realism, it seems, the less potential for trouble. Consider the content--nudity is nudity, but sexual acts as with these shunga prints and depictions of arousal may warrant a different approach.
- These were imaged a couple of years ago and not published until a conversation I had with the curator because of today’s talk. These were held back for a number of subjective reasons that were ultimately overturned in favor of including them in what is one of the most complete collections of the artist’s work. So even if the content is explicit, there may be academic reasons the works should really be available.
- These Warhols from the Family Album were always intended to be published because there aren’t very many Family Albums online in their entirety and including Warhol’s notations. And what’s interesting here is that these are (a) photographs and (b) known individuals in many cases. And we always intended to make them public. So, rely on your curators to define what belongs in the collection, what should be preserved and shared. Ask for their reasoning and use that to inform a larger set of guidelines. So this is a lot of behind-the-scenes internal conversation that varies from curator to curator and doesn’t necessarily follow a standard or a rule from case to case. If a problem arises, what can you offer as explanation?
- Have backup in the form of policy. For your curator who goes out on a limb maybe with an acquisition, or a decision to publish, an institutional policy stating a mission of open access to museum collections and resources, can be what you point to when asked why is this public. The institutional policy also protects the staff like myself who contribute to the conversation and then actually make the public access happen.
- A policy can really be a very simple statement, and we’re still working on ours. My hope is that it goes something like this. What this does is help streamline conversations internally, so that you’re not debating whether to publish every little thing, but instead only debating the works that really merit discussion. It becomes not an issue of subjective preferences “it’s not good,” “we have a better example,” but rather it must go unless “___”. For us, with digitization in full swing, we publish 1,000-1,500 objects per month. We can’t debate each of those, they have to go. Many digitization projects, especially grant funded require public access as a project component. Policy can save you some debates and potentially increase the appeal of your grant application. For us, the policy that requires an image for web publication means that these discussions have to happen.
- No emails, no calls so far, of course that might change after this talk, right? No one is really looking at these pages at all.
- The fact is that no one is really visiting those pages. They aren’t described using metadata that would float them to the top of a google result searching for explicit materials. In the vast cesspool of the internet, if you’re looking for sexually explicit images, there are better places to find it. But if you’re focusing on metadata, it would be real shame to (and not that we would do this) but to end up obscuring something like Nude Descending in an effort to prevent a potentially negative outcome surrounding another work. You might hide the “nudes” but miss the “penises” if you focus on metadata alone.
- So let’s use the nudes as an example, though we’d never censor a work for nudity alone, let’s just let this be the example. There are almost 800 collection works online with “nude” in the title. Many are not at all what you would expect. Metadata matters, but sometimes it’s not the whole picture, so to speak.
- And speaking of metadata, sometimes there are no indicators in the text at all. So someone researching David Lebe’s botanicals might click on “other works by this artist” and come across the Scott pictures. These are not in the online collection as yet, discussions are ongoing. So we’re not sure how to handle these. We want to be sensitive to our audience. We could publish them with a warning, but as soon as you start highlighting them, treating them differently, you float them to the top of those results and open a conversation you might not be prepared to have.
- Which brings me to my next point…The trigger warning as bullseye. If you point to a potentially offensive work like Lebe’s Scott series, and say, this contains explicit imagery, you’ve sort of directed everyone’s eyes to it. And yes, it may offend or not, and it’s good to warn, but again, the metadata is what drives search results.
- So if you decide to redesign object pages to accommodate a warning or layer of protected viewing, realize you’re basically saying “here look at this it’s questionable!” Safer to publish without an image, I should think. But consider whether “Safer” is your goal.
- Proceed with caution--My personal recommendation is to have a policy statement that backs up the decision to publish, but that’s a big project and maybe you can’t get your whole institution on board. In that case, at the very least… Use caution--you know, for some museums these are uncharted waters, but really, even if you’ve been through a controversy before each one is different and new. Careful thought—maybe I haven’t covered it all, in fact, I’m sure I’ve omitted something for time, or overlooked an issue, but putting time into the thinking through the process means you’re better prepared when conflict arises. Transparency—for this you need documentation, make notes of the conversations that happen internally. Get a curator to write a label that contextualizes the work with the same passion that they exhibited in explaining what is going on in the work, like the quote from the artist David Lebe in the earlier slide.
- So balance your goal of open access with sensitivity to your audience and the kinds of thoughts you provoke. Document the care and consideration taken in thinking through whether or not to make something available to the public and in what context. Be prepared to share those notes with others and defend the decision. Conversely, if you have to backtrack and remove an object from online view, then you have documented the process for future reference. Use the discussions you have internally to inform how you treat the work online, how you contextualize it.
- In summary, here’s your roadmap: You are not your audience. You can’t predict what will offend. Have backup. Metadata matters. Warnings might invite offense. Proceed with caution.