TECHNOARTS : In Cyberspace, Can Anyone Really Appreciate Art? : CD-ROMs are giving home computer users access to museum and private collections. But some institutions are holding back from the digital age for fear of losing control--and dollars

Japanese art collector Joe Price hunkers down at his computer in his Orange County home, pops a disc in his CD-ROM drive and calls up a digital image of one of his prized possessions--an exquisitely detailed 18th-Century painting of a rooster by Ito Jakuchu. Zooming in on the feathers, Price points out bits of artistry that might go unnoticed in the painting itself.

“Look here,” he says, magnifying a fluid stripe on one feather. “There are no brush strokes, just a continuous flow of color. Isn’t that amazing?”

Price claims to understand no more than the next computer dunce about how photographs of paintings are transformed into digital reproductions. The process of converting an image to electronic signals in a series of ones and zeros, or digits, and then reassembling them in a precise likeness of the original is a mystery, he says, but he is enthralled with the possibilities.

A retired oil man who gave the Los Angeles County Museum of Art $5 million to launch its Pavilion for Japanese Art, which opened in 1988, Price has promised a major portion of his collection to the museum. Now he is making the artworks available to the public on a $195 CD-ROM published by Digital Collections Inc. in Berkeley.

“This is the most fascinating way of looking at art. You can see and learn more from the computer than from the painting,” he says. “You can color correct the images to natural light. You can enhance and sharpen the picture. You can even compare the real thing with a fake,” he adds, bringing up a pair of images to demonstrate differences between the work of Jakuchu and an imitator.

Wrapping up a demonstration of his CD-ROM’s bells and whistles, Price presents his visitor with a souvenir--a startlingly high-quality color reproduction of the rooster painting, which rolls off a printer connected to the computer.

This is the brave new age of art appreciation, and Price is far from its only acolyte.

While “Masterworks of Japanese Painting: The Etsuko and Joe Price Collection” offers art lovers more than 1,100 full-color images (including 350 complete works and nearly 800 details), along with seven searchable data fields, descriptive commentary, artists’ biographies and an introductory movie with narration and music, other products just now coming on the market provide equally enticing access to museums’ art collections:

* DCI has published a $250 CD-ROM featuring 138 paintings at the venerable Frick Collection in New York. The disc includes an introductory essay by Frick Director Charles Ryskamp, descriptions of artworks by the museum’s curatorial staff and detailed artists’ biographies by art historian Joseph Goldyne. The Berkeley firm--a spinoff of AXS/Optical Technology Resource Inc., which developed the Image Access software program--is now at work on a CD-ROM of the Brooklyn Museum’s ancient Egyptian collection.

* Microsoft Corp., the computer software giant masterminded by Bill Gates and located in Redmond, Wash., has published “Art Gallery,” a $79 CD-ROM featuring more than 2,000 images from the collection of London’s National Gallery. The program is based on the London museum’s Micro Gallery, an interactive information system, designed by the British firm Cognitive Applications Ltd., which allows visitors to peruse the collection at computer kiosks.

* Another Gates company, Continuum Productions Corp. in Bellevue, Wash., is purchasing non-exclusive digital reproduction rights to works in other museums’ collection for an immense archive of pictures that can be viewed electronically. So far, Continuum and its predecessor, Interactive Home Systems, have purchased rights to the entire collection of London’s National Gallery and large portions of holdings in the Seattle Art Museum, the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Barnes Foundation in Merion Station, Pa.

* Trident Software, Inc. in Vienna, Va. is producing a series of $39.95 computer-savers, called “ArtScreens,” which add an element of art education to software programs designed to prevent burn-in when a computer is turned on but not in use. The first of the series, “Great Master Collections,” features 40 reproductions of works from such renowned institutions as the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The images can be programed to appear at random or sequentially, and users can call up descriptive text on any of the artworks.

* The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which already has produced two videodiscs on portions of its art holdings, recently announced plans to install its own version of London’s Micro Gallery, in collaboration with Cognitive Applications Ltd.

* The Art Institute of Chicago has produced and marketed an interactive computer game--inviting children to go on a pre-Columbian treasure hunt or deconstruct a Louise Nevelson sculpture by touching a color monitor--as well as laser discs based on the permanent collection and an electronic catalogue of the complete works of Chicago painter Ed Paschke’s work. A current project, undertaken with Voyager of New York, is an interactive program on ancient art that will enable museum visitors to view both sides of coins, rotate statuary and connect the objects to appropriate maps and illustrations--all by touching a computer screen.

* In Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Art History Information Program is establishing an information and standards organization for digital imaging in the visual arts. And the trust has joined Eastman Kodak Co. in a new venture, LUNA Imaging Inc., which will offer digital imaging services and electronic publishing to the academic community. As its first project, LUNA is compiling a digital archive of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawings for an electronic publication.

But stunning as all these developments may be--particularly to art specialists who developed their expertise by studying actual artworks, books and slides--digital imaging hasn’t exactly taken the art world by storm. For every collection that is turning up on a disc or being scanned for future multimedia projects, there are many museums that haven’t joined the revolution or are merely using the new technology for in-house operations and collections management.

Not that they haven’t been invited. Electronic publishers who are hungry for content have been knocking on museums’ office doors for several years.

Neither are museums holding back because of concern that digital images will replace real artworks or that their audience will turn into mouse potatoes, the computer-literate generation’s version of the couch potato. Art professionals agree that digital imaging can be expected to increase museum audiences through education and outreach.

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What’s keeping museums from plunging into the digital age of art reproduction is fear of losing control--of both a lucrative licensing system and the artworks’ integrity.

“There are too many uncertainties,” says Mary Grace Whalen, of the education department at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has made extensive in-house use of digital images but has declined to license large blocks of images to electronic publishers. “We don’t know what the market will be. We don’t know the value of the material or how it will be used. And, as material and technical processes tend to become cheaper, it may not be necessary to get some big company to do the conversion process,” she says.

Janice Sorkow, director of photo services at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, agrees. “Digitalization is a reality and it is only going to get better,” she says. “One of the missions of the museum is education and dissemination of information. But once you give permission for digital reproduction, you don’t know how it will be used. We are wrestling with policies and standards for getting the information out there.”

Museums hold copyrights to photographic images of many, though not all, works in their collections. The exceptions are works whose copyrights have expired and are now in the public domain, and pieces whose copyrights are held by artists or their estates.

Publishers who wish to reproduce museums’ copyrighted images--or the museums’ photographs of works in the public domain--must have their requests approved and pay for one-time publication rights, at a cost of $200 to $500 per image. This practice not only generates income for museums, it allows them to control how the images are used.

Sending digital images of artworks out into the world renders the concept of one-time use obsolete and exposes the images to an unimaginable range of use and abuse, many museum technicians and administrators say. Even fervent advocates of digital imaging agree that opportunities for piracy and manipulation are inherent in the technology--and that apparent obstacles can be subverted with the right equipment and expertise.

“We are at a primeval stage in this ooze,” says Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University who is organizing a panel on digital technology for the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, to be held June 1-4 in Seattle. The directors are expected to study a complicated maze of legal, technical and commercial issues concerning digital reproductions of artworks.

One of the speakers will be Bill Gates, who is widely credited with pushing museums into the Digital Age. His early attempts, starting in 1989, to buy reproduction rights for an encyclopedic visual data base--of which fine art is but one component--met considerable resistance. Although Gates easily engineered a hometown deal, persuading the Seattle Art Museum to sell rights to 1,000 images, personnel at many other museums claim that his representatives were so aggressive, persistent and ignorant about art that they alienated potential clients. “The word went out, if they call, don’t answer the phone,” says a staff member at a major East Coast institution.

Other vendors have approached museums as well, but many of the institutions have responded by reconsidering their licensing policies and trying to figure out how to turn the technology to their advantage.

“We are in the very, very, very early phase of discussing policies and what we want to do in this area, first inside the museum and later outside,” says Mickey Carpenter, director of photographic permissions and services at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Caution is wise, according to attorney Christine Steiner, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who frequently speaks and writes about protection of intellectual property.

“Museums have lots of experience with publishers and rights,” Steiner says. “What’s different about this (onslaught of requests) is volume, variety and velocity.” Electronic publishers pursue museums because they have vast quantities of a desirable product, museums’ names have a market value, and vendors assume that the fewer sources they deal with, the easier the rights issue will be to resolve, she says.

But museums hold works of art in trust. They have a responsibility to protect the art and they need to know how the material they license will be used, Steiner says. She warns against selling exclusive rights and signing contracts that contain confidentiality clauses, while advising museums to keep a tight rein on quality control.

Since no standard contract exists, electronic publishers negotiate every museum deal individually, working with curators to select images and using an electronic camera to scan photographs provided by the museums. The museums generally receive a cash advance against royalties and a promise of future royalties if the product produces sufficient income.

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The push toward marketing digital reproductions of artworks is but a tiny indicator of the electronic publishing industry’s quest for multimedia content of all descriptions. What Continuum wants from museums is “premier visual information,” according to attorney Steve Davis, acting head of the firm. His characterization of fine art may make purists squirm, but he says the cultural community itself has defined this top echelon of “information.”

The images licensed by Continuum will be used for two products, Davis says. One is “an on-line relicensing service . . . a one-stop shopping opportunity for publishers, producers and creators.” The second is “a very sophisticated data base” of artworks and descriptive text that could be linked to other kinds of information--say, photographs of related cities and landscapes, historical text or appropriate music--delivered on up to 50 electronic pathways. “The possibilities are pretty mind-boggling,” he says.

With five museums under contract, Continuum has made significant inroads. A press release announcing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collaboration with the firm solemnly announces “a long-term working relationship” and quotes the museum’s director, Anne d’Harnoncourt, as saying she hopes the digital database will help the institution “find new audiences to appreciate and learn from our vast collections.”

Continuum’s conception of fine art as a consumer product and its plans for an archive that mixes artworks with many other kinds of material still raise eyebrows in art circles, but the company has made some smart moves. One was to woo art historian Hal Opperman, a specialist in 17th- and 18th-Century French art, from the University of Washington. Having left his ivory tower to “participate in a fabulous opportunity to be an educator on a grand scale,” as he puts it, Opperman characterizes digital technology as the biggest revolution ever in the reproduction and dissemination of art.

But perhaps Continuum’s most inspired gesture was to hire as consultant J. Carter Brown, the former director of Washington’s National Gallery and the very personification of the cultural elite.

Beating the drum for the digital revolution is a great part-time gig for Brown, who is something of a visionary and appears to enjoy the spotlight. The upcoming AAMD conference proves that digital technology is “topic A” in museum circles, Brown says. And he cheerfully dispels techno-qualms, which he likens to “that old thing we all had when we were children: fear of the dark.”

Reeling off behind-the-scenes advantages for museums, he notes that digital reproductions are far more accurate, permanent, accessible and compact than photographs. The technology also can be immensely helpful to conservators, who can clean a tiny section of an artwork and predict the results of a complete restoration on their computer screens.

Digital reproductions also are likely to expand museums’ audiences, Brown says. Just as films based on books have created a huge market for authors E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton, CD-ROMs on art will whet appetites for original artworks, he says. “What keeps people out of museums is a lack of familiarity with the subject. The more access people have to art, the more they will want.” As for questions about copyrights and piracy, Brown says, “I think the market will work that out.” Offering an analogy of fear about pirated videotapes, he says the low cost of renting videotapes offers little incentive to would-be pirates and notes the enormous volume of business done by video rental stores.

Opportunities for pirating reproductions are already available, according to Brown and other advocates of electronic publishing. Anyone can snap a photograph and have it digitalized on a Kodak Photo CD or go to a copy shop and have a plate from an art book scanned. But spokesmen for software companies say that protection of intellectual property is fundamental to the industry and that they are pumping considerable effort into developing protective devices for licensed imagery.

Meanwhile, technology marches on. And if there is any consensus on the digitization of fine art, it is that technology will drive the market.

“It’s a very exciting environment to work in right now,” Steiner says. “No one seems to have an absolutist view. But I am convinced that museums can control their own digital future.”