BRINGING ART HISTORY INTO THE COMPUTER AGE

Don’t expect Michael Ester to be a nerd in a beret. The new chief of the Getty Art History Information Program--a position requiring expertise in both art and technology--looks more like an ultra-bright, movie-style computer-whiz kid who grew up and walked straight into an esoteric profession.

Young (36), slim, curly haired and personable, he is eager to get on with the daunting task of bringing the musty sphere of art history “out of the Dark Ages” and into the light of the computer era. The Art History Information Program--formulated from surveys to determine professional needs--is charged with developing research tools for gathering data, coordinating and integrating scattered information sources and providing a comprehensive aid to scholars.

Don’t expect Ester to be a stuffy egotist either. “If I have a position, it can’t be that big a deal,” he said in what has to be a classic example of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s bent toward understatement. While Getty officials continue to downplay the impact of the institution’s vast wealth on the art market and emphasize that trust programs are “catalytic” rather than legislative forces, Ester insists that he is not such an unusually qualified human being.

His modesty comes from believing that it is perfectly normal for a child of the ‘60s to have doctorates in the seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics and archeology and to pursue science and the humanities simultaneously. “My particular blend of skills may be unusual, but the idea isn’t so peculiar if you take it in context,” Ester said during an interview in his Santa Monica office. “When I was getting my education (at George Washington and Brandeis universities), that eclectic kind of combination was just taken for granted. My adviser in archeology had a Ph.D. in physics. That was before the default of people who went off and became lawyers or other sensible things.

“It never occurred to me to study computers and archeology because it would lead to a good profession; those areas just interested me at the time,” he continued. “In archeology, I concentrated on Mesoamerica (working on an adviser’s project in Teotihuacan, Mexico). In computers, I come from an era of universities buying a computer and having an installation but no staff. Things developed by getting a bunch of students together, pouring over the manuals, hooking things up, kick-starting the computer and seeing what happened.

“Today, there’s a whole different ethic. By the time I left academia, whole departments were being merged into humanities, and the humanities were being used as a support for other disciplines. There’s a terrible shrinking of staff and resources. That brings up one of the missions of the Art History Information Program: giving some leverage to scholars who will likely be under-funded and likely be understaffed. One of the ways to do that is to give them tools that will allow them to cover an enormous breadth of art history readily.”

Ester looks forward to a time when scholars can approach a single source through a variety of “windows” (artist, author or collection) for a survey of the literature on a specific subject, to locate artworks and to find detailed information about them.

In addition to developing a data base that will provide easy access to a breadth of coverage, Ester says the program will make institutions improve their record-keeping methods: “Back-of-the-envelope ways of accessioning and recording things are simply not sufficient.”

One Getty project already working in that direction is called the Museum Prototype. Eight institutions involved in the prototype--the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in Washington and the art museums of Princeton University and Dartmouth College--will put complete information about artworks in their collections into a common data base, using a uniform vocabulary.

Emphasizing the difficulty of such a task, Ester said: “Understand that only three of the eight museums previously had any data-processing capabilities whatsoever. Of those, some were working with terribly archaic systems. And there are a lot of variables to be considered: author, artist, location of work, date, size--pretty straightforward stuff, but when you realize how many different ways an author’s name has been spelled or how art is measured (in inches or centimeters, with or without a frame), those are not easy things. If you can get a bunch of museums to sign up for a similar format for describing a piece of art, that will be a heck of an accomplishment.”

In addition to initiating such research projects, the Art History Information Program has taken charge of existing enterprises with the goal of automating and investigating ways of integrating their efforts. When Ester arrived at his office four weeks ago, the program had already taken over several projects that produce tools for research: the Provenance Index (based at the Getty), the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (in Williamstown, Mass.), the Avery Index (at Columbia University) and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (at North Bennington, Vt.).

“RILA (the International Repertory of the Literature of Art) probably would have gone on (without the Getty), but it needed funding and it’s been expanded,” Ester said. “Other projects wouldn’t get done because they have no constituency. Even the notion of bringing all this information together for the world of art isn’t exactly a high-profile item--you can’t see it, you can’t oh and ah it, the public isn’t enthralled with it.”

International outreach is a major aspect of Ester’s work, but he will also be involved with in-house projects at the Getty. “The photo archive, consisting of about three quarters of a million photographs, is just one of 34 herculean projects here, never mind trying to consolidate things outside the Getty,” he said, in an effort to describe the scope of his enterprise.

“But I’m less concerned with starting new projects than with an overall goal. As I get breathing time during the next few months, I’ll be trying to come up with a vision of what an integrated system would look like: What the pieces are, what the relationships have to be, what kind of variability would exist for different schools, different languages. The notion is not that you shoehorn everybody’s collection into the same system, but that we are able to take people’s data and work a transformation process on it so it can be turned into a common form.

It’s kind of like giving a party and nobody comes--if you establish the best language and nobody uses it, what good is it? You have to allow people to find the fit between any standards you set and what they’re doing. Our objective is not to go out and generate a need, but to satisfy what is out there; then you can begin judging individual projects by that standard. That isn’t just going to be my creation, it’s going to be a straw man that other art historians can criticize.

“If we pull this off--if we can give to the individual scholar a perspective akin to what he or she already understands, while opening up vistas to data that would otherwise be impossible--that to me is a knockout.”

So far, Ester says he has encountered less resistance to the Getty’s program than concern that it won’t move fast enough. He plans to develop practical applications quickly so that people can see how the system will work for them. Eventually, he believes the program will be a global network, with its permanent home (at the projected Getty Fine Arts Center in Brentwood) functioning as “a node with phone connections.”

But that is a long way off. “Several generations of systems will come and go before then,” he said. “Imagine trying to design a computer system for a place that won’t open until 1991. We may be able to carry the whole thing around in our pockets by then.”

Ester arrived at the Getty armed with experience in academia and the private sector. During five years at Rutgers as an associate professor of archeology, he taught courses in the application of computers in the humanities, data-base management and structured programming. He served as a consultant on various projects and was general manager at Technical Data Processing Associates in New Jersey before assuming his most recent post, information systems manager at URS Berger, an environmental research firm in San Bernardino.

Ester says he accepted the “hand-wringing challenges” offered by the Getty Art History Information Program with a mixture of excitement about the program’s potential and some reservations about returning to academia: “The business world is very clean; if you do a good job for someone, he makes more money. How do you know when you have designed a good program for art history?”

Asked what convinced him that the Getty was the place for him, he quickly replied, “The people. They are very serious doers.”