Cory Doctorow keynote on public goodwill and photography bans: transcript

Key points

• Libraries, archives, galleries and museums hold great public goodwill, which is their biggest asset when fighting budget cuts.
• At Greenwich, staff gave shifting reasons for a photography ban: light-sensitive brass, copyright, and collectors' stock-photo markets.
• Banning photography turns an institution that urges people to record the world into one that entombs that ethic.
• Collectors' loan conditions should be weighed against the value of public participation in culture.
• A Warhol-era portrait show in a national gallery banned photos, even of the sign, which he found ironic.
• Copying is how every artist and all culture begins, as shown by his Star Wars writing and his baby daughter copying a stuck-out tongue.

Chapters

1. 0:00Public goodwill as the sector's biggest asset
2. 2:17Squandering goodwill: the Greenwich photography ban
3. 6:42Rethinking collectors' conditions on loans
4. 7:26Warhol portraits and a ban on photography
5. 9:03Copying as the way artists and culture begin
6. 11:53Florence's David and the Magritte show

Full transcript

0:00And I've had the great, great privilege of working alongside librarians and archivists at WIPO, the United Nations, and another policy forum, and I've never met a more principled, sharp-witted, and effective, and very, very well-organized cadre of people who are better advocates for the public interest. I was practically raised at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario Science Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto where I'm from. So when I hear of an attack on the sector, it really does get my blood up. It makes me want to call my MP, it makes me want to dig in my pocket to make a donation, it makes me want to get the word out to my friends.

0:40There's a word for that asset. We call it goodwill. And libraries, archives, galleries, and museums have it in great plenty. This is something that I tell working librarians all the time, something I think they often forget. You're unimpeachable. No one says, oh, that librarian is just trying to get a larger collections budget because she wants to feather her cushy nest. When people who work in the sector speak, people might disagree with them, but no one seriously believes that you become an archivist for the glamour and big money.

1:14This goodwill, this quality of both being loved and unimpeachable, is the single biggest asset in your never-ending ancient fight for funding and survival. When the government comes to you with budget cuts, the most impressive thing that you can say to them is, if you take away our money and shut our doors, millions of voters will be aghast and will think that you are barbarous cretins and worse. Because when the government comes to you with cuts, talking about your vital role in Britain's cultural life will only get you so far.

1:46because when the cuts come, the question is very rarely will we cut vital institutions, but rather which of our vital institutions are to be cut. And that's what a public outrage is your friend. Just like the camper who's sprinting away from a hungry bear and tells his luckless companion, I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to run faster than you. Goodwill, like everything else, is subject to the monotonous, inescapable force of entropy.

2:17It is hard to marshal and very easy to squander. I think that this sector knows a lot about goodwill and marshalling it. The public outreach programs from Britain's public institutions are without equal. As a parent, an artist, and a lifelong learner, I salute you all for the amazing work you've done on finding ways to connect your institutions with British taxpayers and visitors to this country. But I want to talk to you today about squandering goodwill. Specifically, the awful transaction that takes place when your stakeholders, the public, show up with the sensible view that the culture in their public institutions is their culture, and that they should be able to use it in the ways that they have always used culture.

2:59I'll give you some examples from my recent experience. I moved to London in 2003 from California. I've been living with my parents in Toronto. I started to come out to visit me fairly regularly. My parents came to visit me one time and of course I took them to the Grandage Observatory. My grandfather was a clockmaker, and he made my dad's first watch, excuse me, I've got a bit of a cold, he made my dad's first watch out of parts that he painstakingly saved from movements that he'd worked on over the years, built this kind of Franken-watch for him and gave it to him as a bar mitzvah present.

3:31And I grew up in a kind of wonderland of clockworks and watches, precision timepieces, half-built clocks, jeweler's loops, and instruments. So a visit to Greenwich was very much up our street until we noticed there were no photography signs everywhere. So I asked a staff member in my extremely obnoxious North American way, why are there no photography signs in your museum? Well, they started off by telling me that the brass clocks were light-sensitive, and they couldn't be photographed with a flash. So, I said, you know, no offense to Greenwich, but I think that the era of the ground-shaking scientific revelations from Greenwich are probably over, and certainly I haven't seen any peer-reviewed papers on the effect of light on brass coming from this institution.

4:20They said, oh, you're right. Actually, it's because the clocks are copyrighted. And I said, I don't think that there's a copyright that protects anything for hundreds of years, much less a clock, which is, of course, not a copyrightable subject. And then they said, actually, actually, it's because the clocks are largely on loan from product collectors, and they want to be able to protect a market and sell the stock art of the clocks. Now, speaking as someone who's bought a lot of stock art in my day, I used to work in advertising, in the early days of the web just like everybody else in the early days of the web.

4:54I have my doubts about whether amateur photos of the clocks in Greenwich would seriously impinge on any kind of market for the stock photos of those clocks, but even stipulating that there's a thriving market for stock photos of the clocks on display in Greenwich and stipulating that we would destroy such a market if we allowed the public to take pictures, I still think it's worth asking what costs arise for the prohibition of photography of the instruments on display in Greenwich. So the Greenwich Observatory is a temple to humanity's use of tools to record the world around us.

5:29If you could only carve one message over the doorway to the observatory, it would be something like, Record the world to know the world. If you were to hand John Flamsteed a camera phone or a pocket point and shoot, he'd probably weep with joy. If you gave him a digital SLR, he might have a heart attack. When you prohibit the photography of these exhibits, you change the character of the institution that houses them. You are no longer an institution that incites patrons to carry on the work of the scientists who built that building.

6:06Rather, you are entombing that ethic. The message is no longer record the world, it is once we were able to record the world. No institution could survive without loans from collectors, and I'm not suggesting that you should. But there are plenty of demands from a collector that would be an absolute non-starter. A collector who said to you, you may only have this piece if you don't show me to women, or if everyone who looks at them has to promise to vote Tory. You would totally show him the door, no matter what he was offering, to let you stick in your case.

6:42What I'm suggesting is that we should consider recalibrating the notional meter by which we judge the conditions that collectors put on their pieces. I believe that public participation in cultural life and treasures have been undervalued by a cash-strapped sector that has had to depend more and more on public-private exploitation agreements and private collectors. This is a mistake. It's an honest mistake, but it's a mistake nevertheless. If you want the public to be prepared to go to the wall for your clocks, your best bet is to have those clocks kindle at the kind of eureka moment that gave the nation Flamsteed in the first place, and the work of the observatory.

7:26And anything you do that subverts that mission will always cost you more than you earn. I don't mean to pick on Greenwich. It remains one of the most amazing collections in a city full of amazing collections, and I speak as someone who's privileged to have an office practically next door to the Jeffrey. But here's another example from another outstanding institution, the poor and much picked on National Public Gallery. On a subsequent visit from my parents, I took them to the MPG, where we were especially interested in a selection of Warhol-era pop portraits.

7:58Incredibly, these portraits, which are really an exuberant declaration of the artistic power of appropriation and fair dealing, were surrounded by signs prohibiting photos. Again, the gallery staff explained to me that this was due to copyright, and even forbade me from photographing the sign that said no photography on it, on the grounds that it contained copyrighted typography. The irony of a prohibition on photographing Warhol would be hilarious if it wasn't so utterly sad.

8:31If the purpose of that show was to inspire a generation of new British Warhols whose works could someday hand it in the NPG, you could hardly have subverted it more neatly than with these twin messages of their dealing is something that someone else got to do a very long time ago, and today you must not reproduce any part of the world around you, not even the words on the signs, without explicit permission. how many of the painters in the MPG would have gotten their start if they'd labored under these conditions.

9:03After all, copying is how every artist starts. It's the definition of culture, something that lots of people know, do, handle, and think about. I started writing books in 1977 when I was six. My dad took me to see Star Wars. And one thing that was odd about growing up in the 70s as opposed to today Is that in the 70s, kids never really experienced complicated narratives. We didn't have DVDs, we didn't have cable. We had kids' cartoons, and the narratives were really straightforward and linear. And kids' books, where the narratives were really straightforward and linear, so for all that Star Wars is hardly the greatest work of plotting ever accomplished, it was really the first time I'd ever seen a story that was complicated enough to have more than one point of view, to have reversals in it, to have some kind of meaningful dramatic tension that arose from it, and so on.

9:52And so when I got back home, my brain was just on fire with it. And I did what everyone does when they're little and they want to understand how something works. I tried to take the movie apart. I grabbed some paper and I stapled it up the side and I trimmed it to about the size of a mouse maker paperback. And I tried to write out the story of Star Wars, excuse me, started to write out the story of Star War over and over and over again. Trying to, like a pianist, practicing scales. And that was how I figured out that I wanted to be a writer.

10:22When I was 12, I wrote a very bad Conan pastiche, and then for the years that followed, I continued to take the works around me, and this is something I still do, and try to understand how they work by taking them apart, replicating their effects, and making them go, and this is something I'm hardly unique in, I think it's something, excuse me, I need some water. Something hardwired into us. When my daughter was born, she's three, and she was born a few years ago. My parents came over from Toronto to see her. And my mom has a PhD in early childhood education. She's kind of a baby whisperer. And she said, so have you stuck your tongue out at her yet? Sorry, I've got one. One of the things about having a toddler is you've always got a clue. So she said, have you stuck your tongue out at it yet? And I said, no, mom, I haven't stuck my tongue out at my two-week-old yet. Why would I do such a thing?

11:16And she said, just watch. And she picked Posey up in her arms, and she went like this. And Posey, who had never seen a mirror at this point, who didn't even know she had a tongue, looked back up at my mother and did this. Because we copy like we nuzzle for the rest. We have a name for things that don't copy themselves. We call them dead. We are the descendants of things that figured out how to copy themselves through some mysterious process three to four billion years ago. All of our notional ancestors who didn't figure out how to copy themselves didn't become our ancestors.

11:53Copying is how we've always made culture. When you go through the streets of Florence you see a David on every corner because for hundreds of years the way you become a sculptor at Florence is you find the best sculpture you can and knock one off and do it again and again until you figure out how to replicate those effects, the things that caught your eye, you teach it to your hands, you teach it to your mind. And so, of course, today when you go to see the David in Florence, the curators who are in charge of him have prohibited taking pictures of him. So, of course, the National Portrait Gallery is not alone in this.

12:29LACMA put up a show of Magritte, which was stuffed full of great artists' remixes of Magritte, including, of course, Warhol, and they had the same deal. They too had come not to celebrate creativity, but because of the conditions set by the collectors who loaned them, they had come to bury it. I repeat, not one word of this is to minimize the brutal and awful pressure faced by all public institutions, even in good times, and especially in hard times like this. It's not an easy job. You may not have...

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Cory Doctorow, Part 1.ogv by Giota Alevizou, giotita (2010-11-27), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.