In the course of our two-day discussions I was struck by two things: One was the entrepreneurial aspect of the kind of web initiative represented by a good proportion of our participants. I am not sure whether this is typical, but it seems to me that individuals, serious and committed, often with academic backgrounds but often without institutional backing, have been responsible for some of the most interesting of the diverse art-historical initiatives that constitute "art history on the web" and this says something about both the web’s complex status as a space of authority (in other words, sites that are self-evidently good and useful, like Latribunedelart.com, for example, don’t need specific institutional or academic backing and can be distinguished from flotsam and jetsam sites by their content. Which means of course that in a short time, the art history community has taught itself skills- how to read content, which sites are only useful for images, which sites contain "primary" data, where they can find the latest info or reviews, etc. Just as the entrepreneurs have built these sites so the users have become experts independently -self-navigating around them, sending their friends hints about the best sites, etc, and creating a intellectual-social network but all without institutional guidance or really a formal framework of analysis - (a framework which l’observatoire critique, for instance, is now trying to provide). It strikes me that this ad hoc, needs-based network is a fine building block for a more extended intellectual network which might pool its knowledge, experiences and skills in a more organized way.

But my major reflection in the course of the two days was more radical: I came to the view that while Art Historians have complained about image rights, etc, they are still caught in a paradigm which emphasises their unique intellectual property, their "ownership" of information, sources, etc, -some of this is not the fault of the individual curator or academic, of course, but deeply engrained in the structures of both the museum and the university - where rewards are given for individual work, independent research, etc, and where tenure and other credentialling decisions are all about competition and asserting one’s own smartness and scholarly excellence at the expense of the supposed "Field" - in the humanities, academics often tend to think of themselves as fighting a heroic liberal fight against "powers that be", but I think in the case of scholarship in Art History, museums and universities are more like Microsoft than anything else - jealous of their "property" (physical or intellectual) and proprietry in their modes, averse to challenge and innovation - I have been a strong supporter of the access and educational mission of ArtStor, but we must be honest -how else can we explain the particular modes by which ArtStor functions (proprietry software, subscription access, etc) - except by the fact that museums do not want high-quality images of their artworks to be freely available for download. But why not?? only to protect revenue streams, perhaps? Likewise, individual scholars (often in privileged positions in the museum, academic or commercial worlds) jealously guard data on artists while promising catalogues raisonné that are never delivered - why shouldn’t the catalogue raisonne be worked on by teams in a cooperative model of additive, peer-reviewed and moderated "wiki" scholarship?

So, perhaps we need an "Open Source" art history, innovators prepared to make their findings, data, etc, available to the scholarly community via open-access sites, and museums prepared to release their images into the public domain at high enough definition to be truly useful; collaborative projects on individual artists which use social networking innovations developed in other fields? To do this, both the scholar and the institution must relinquish something held "precious", but in the end , unless we do this, we’re going to be stuck in a nineteenth-century model of intellectual endeavour well into the twenty-first century.

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Autres Aperçus Singuliers :
> Introduction
> K. Deepwell
>B. Kelley Jr
> C. Kuan
> M. Marmor
> W. Tronzo
> C. Welger-Barboza