Open Art Images: a search engine for open access images of art
Walter Benjamin, the first theorist of the impact of the reproducibility of works of art on mass culture, noted as early as 1931 how easier it is to get a hold of a work of art in a photograph rather than in reality.
The understanding of great works was transformed at about the same time the techniques of reproduction were being developed. They can no longer be regarded as the works of individuals; they have become a collective creation […]. In the final analysis, mechanical reproduction is a technique of diminution that helps men to achieve a control over works of art without whose aid they could no longer be used.
Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1931
The digitisation of cultural heritage and its online fruition amplified even more art’s social function. Acquiring reproductions of works of art has never been easier. And their creative reuse makes us producers or co-producers of content, rather than just users.
Yet, finding high-quality images of works of art through search engines is no easy task. To solve this problem, the graphic designer and developer Viviana Paga has devised and released a search engine for reproductions of art works: Open Art Images.
I spoke with Viviana to learn more about this project.
How did you get the idea for Open Art Images?
As a graphic designer, I often observed how difficult can be to find high-resolution pictures of works of art, coming from authoritative sources, through traditional search engines. But what interested me, and what I think is the core of this project, was to increase the visibility of world cultural heritage, exploiting the tremendous potential that the internet can have in the dissemination of knowledge.
Even if we live in a period that gives great importance to visual communication, it is mostly a commercial and superficial kind of communication, that leads us to be passive consumers of images. For this reason, we should reappropriate of the art of the past, which is our cultural legacy and that still convey inspiring messages and ideals of beauty.
How does image research work on the site?
The site allows you to search by author, title and keyword. I wanted to go beyond the simple search by artist or title of the work, allowing thematic or iconographic research for themes and subjects. So I created a search engine indexed on image-related content and not on tags and rigid categorizations.
I based my site on open databases, such as the Wikimedia database, which in turn interfaces with open data made available by museums and other cultural institutions. In this way, Open Art Images allows users to search across several galleries at the same time, cross-referencing different open sources.
Why did you choose the Wikimedia database as your primary source? Did its use present any difficulties?
Wikimedia is probably the largest repository of freely reusable cultural content. The quantity and quality of its resources and the wealth of projects carried out in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions make its database the reference source in this field. Besides, for a matter of digital ecology, it was important to me that Open Art Images did not add or duplicate images but made good quality content already available online more easily accessible.
Wikimedia’s database is collective and shared, so any user can contribute by entering images and text. This openness is fascinating and requires, even technically, an open mindset to develop highly adaptable software. It also entails additional difficulties, especially in content management, due to the great variety of data structures. Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on this aspect so that the information set of a file is more easily readable and understandable for both people and machines.
Wikimedia users employ CC licenses, but reproductions of works of art are often subject to related rights even when they should be in the public domain. How do you deal with this issue on your site?
The purpose of Open Art Images is to make accessible high definition pictures that are otherwise difficult to find, and to reference sources and licenses in the best possible way.
In the past few years, new possibilities have emerged in the reproduction of digital content, thanks to single institutions and to the evolution of the regulations on the subject. As the EU Directive (2019/790) on copyright and related rights addressed, the principle is that digital reproductions of visual works in the public domain should themselves remain in the public domain.
Given the complexity of copyright issues, we try to better orientate users on copyright issues and provide them with the information they need to reuse the images legitimately. At the moment we’re working with experts to identify borderline cases and exclude them from the site or report unreliable sources. It is precisely on this aspect that I am focusing my work before releasing the first official version of the software.
In any case, given the high number of images — over two million and rising — that can be reached via Open Art Images, it is difficult to control all the content. For this reason, we invite institutions themselves or licensees to report any copyright infringements.
I also hope that this project will help to raise awareness among a wider public on the issue of copyright and image licensing, often perceived as an exclusively technical debate. This topic concerns everyone since it focuses on the dissemination of knowledge and its boundaries.
Open Art Images is a project that you designed and created yourself. It’s still in a beta version, so how would you like to develop it in the future?
This is the basic version of the site and to date it is totally self-produced and self-financed. To make it grow over time, and in order to achieve important technical developments, it is essential to find a form of funding, through donations or partnerships. It’s not a sustainable project for one person, so I hope to find people or institutions interested in collaborating and investing in the project to make it grow together.
The site is, however, only a part of the project. The reuse of the art of the past is just as important to me. The reflection on the digitisation of art objects for me preceded the idea of the site. Works made ephemeral by digitisation can acquire new concreteness and new meanings through download and reuse, entering a flow of creative regeneration.
The fact that I focused on a type of research linked to words stems from my desire to investigate the relationship between text and image. There is a quote by John Berger on the site because the English writer and art critic was a great source of inspiration for me. For Berger, creating sequences of images already meant creating a story.
I would like Open Art Images to continue to move on these two parallel tracks in the future. The technical one and the creative one.
To design the site you started from your work experience, and from a concrete difficulty, but did you also have specific users in mind?
All the creative people: graphic designers, designers, video makers who need to do iconographic research and find references. The world of publishing and the educational sector: students and teachers, especially from art schools and universities. The specialised people who find themselves working with these resources daily, but also simple enthusiasts and any internet user who needs easier access to art images.
This period when we could not travel has made us understand, even more, how important it is to have the cultural heritage of humanity online and to be able to use it anywhere in the world.
