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Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damaged' in 60 years
- Rebelgecko 7y agoInteresting article it sounds like they're putting a lot of (warranted) trust in the students. They were a bit coy about it, but I'd be curious to see what the values of the paintings are. This is slightly off-topic but it was interesting to learn that "homely" has a very different meaning in the UK. Similar to "homey" in the US
- jagged-chisel 7y agoI have questions: 0) How widespread is this program announced, and which students take advantage of it? Maybe students of art are more cautious. Maybe business students don't know about the program. 1) Are they all framed and behind glass/plastic/whatever? If so, they're mostly protected from casual damage. 2) Are these originals or copies? 3) Is there a policy, communicated to the borrowers, that damage has punitive consequences? If so, that could be a deterrent.
- sweeneyrod 7y agoIt's not particularly popular/widely advertised. The handful of people I know who have done it are all art enthusiasts. Probably the mild inconvenience of getting the painting back to your room is a factor here. There's a £30 deposit per painting https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/kettles-yard-art-loan-cambridge-13695555 https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/kettles...
- kyeb 7y agoMIT has something similar for its students - they lottery off an entire gallery of art to students to keep in their dorm rooms for the year every fall [0]. I have no idea what the damage statistics are for it, but this just reminded me of it. [0] https://listart.mit.edu/collections/student-lending-art-program https://listart.mit.edu/collections/student-lending-art-prog...
- madcaptenor 7y agoI was just going to mention this. Apparently they'll only loan prints to students. Faculty can get the better stuff: https://listart.mit.edu/collections/campus-loan-art-program https://listart.mit.edu/collections/campus-loan-art-program
- pixeloution 7y agoIn this context, prints mean "original prints" which doesn't translate to junk or reproductions. Some original prints are worth in excess of half a million dollars.
- madcaptenor 7y agoThat's true. I don't know enough to know what the prints they're lending out are worth.
- daenz 7y agoTrust with accountability and respect seems to go a long way some times but not others. Anyone have a theory why this system worked so effectively but other systems involving trust don't?
- username90 7y agoTrust works well if you have decent people. Exactly what makes people decent is hard to say, but it is not unthinkable that students who got into Cambridge are a bit more decent than average.
- ReggieJJJ 7y agoCareful, you are skirting wrongthink, citizen.
- Bjartr 7y agoOr, are at least more likely to go for the long con than the smash & grab.
- alimw 7y agoWell getting into Cambridge probably indicates some degree of respect for humanity's body of work to date. That's a pretty narrow definition of decency though.
- SkyBelow 7y agoI think it has to do with reputation and the cost of entry. I use to play on a minecraft server that had a griefer trap right at spawn. The server automatically monitored any attempts to grief and auto banned griefers while sending a server wide announcement. When the server was wide open and anyone could join, the ban notice would spill out so fast we had to get an admin to silence it. When we swapped to a whitelist that required a person to submit an application and wait to be approved, messages were rare. Only one or two a week. When we swapped to invite only, we never had the message go off. Not once from what I remember. As we swapped between the three states (in an attempt to maintain a certain server population level), the pattern was kept up. The lower the cost to get in, the more people who violated trust. The higher the price, the less people who violated trust. When personal reputation was on the line, no one violated trust.
- s_dev 7y agoTrinity College Dublin does the same thing. It's for free as well -- I think maybe just for students with rooms on campus but I'm not sure.
- 333c 7y agoMy college does this as well. It's been happening since 1940 [1], so 79 years, longer than Cambridge. More info in [2]. The collection even includes some works by Picasso. It's very popular here — students camp out overnight to maintain their spot in line, and the art up for rental tends to run out quickly. [1]: https://www.oberlin.edu/news/art-rental-behind-scenes-look https://www.oberlin.edu/news/art-rental-behind-scenes-look [2]: https://www.oberlin.edu/news/visionary-behind-art-rental https://www.oberlin.edu/news/visionary-behind-art-rental
- snegu 7y agoHa! I came into the thread to mention Oberlin. I remember the madness around trying to get a piece.
- glup 7y agoUC Berkeley also has a similar program, FYI
- Lutzb 7y agoOur library in does the same. The Graphotek only charges a small fee of €2.50 per painting. http://www1.stuttgart.de/stadtbibliothek/bvs/actions/profile/view.php?id=64 http://www1.stuttgart.de/stadtbibliothek/bvs/actions/profile...
- swayvil 7y agoSpeaking as a semi-famous artist. Art is a feast. After the feast you poop. Then the collectors come and hoard the poop for all eternity, occasionally lending the precious stuff out to students.
- ReggieJJJ 7y agoI find this position rather irreconcilable. If you don't want the collectors not to hoard your poop, then don't produce it and especially don't sell it to them. Why would you have this mentality? If you don't want people to support your work with their patronage and appreciate your work as the "hoard" it on display in their house, why sell it at all and not just donate it and produce it for free? No one is stopping you from creating art for these types of programs to rent out art. Why not start a public version of that and stock it up so that everyone can just get low cost art for their homes that you produce for free … of course to avoid people from hoarding it.
- datapunk 7y agoSay I printed this comment. Put it in a frame and auctioned it as art. Would you be the artist for creating the comment? Or would I be the artist for using the comment and framing it in a creative way?
- rectangletangle 7y agoBoth?
- Jach 7y ago"Derivative work" is the phrase to resolve any conundrums here.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoThere's a HN story from the past year or two about someone literally printing out other people's Twitter and/or Facebook pages and selling the prints in galleries for $thousands. I don't know the correct search terms to find it but it's out there. EDIT: Richard Prince[0] I guess I've been on HN longer than I thought. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689889
- kazinator 7y agoIf you have to register with I.D., it's not purely based on trust.
- grepthisab 7y agoSure it is, it just moves the trust to trusting the verified person and away from simply trusting the system.
- kazinator 7y agoBut that's not what a phrase like "purely based on trust" means; that means "purely based on trust in the person" (rather than trust in various "social collateral" that creates obligations in the person).
- okmokmz 7y agoAre you implying you can't trust someone if you ask for their identity before making a transaction/trade/deal?
- gowld 7y agoIt's not like the student can re-create the art if they destroy it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 7y agoWould be really funny for an art student to paint many copies of the lent art, then return a half dozen copies with the original.
- codingdave 7y agoCopying works of art is a longstanding tradition when learning to draw/paint. This would likely get kudos from the art department, not laughs.
- Loughla 7y ago100%. They would be impressed you were able to recreate a great work on your own, and it might end with an assistantship in a studio somewhere on campus.
- justincormack 7y agoI borrowed some of these. And returned them.
- alliao 7y agoI wonder if any came back improved
- davinic 7y agoWhen it comes to long-term storage of art, damage can be calculated in more ways than whether a piece of art is noticeably defaced. The biggest threat to these pieces lies in being stored outside of a climate, light, and humidity-controlled environment. When the lifespan of a thing is hundreds or thousands of years, this matters just as much. However, if the museum doesn't normally keep its stored pieces in a controlled environment, then this should be no different. But kudos to these organizations for trusting the students enough to do this.
- jandrese 7y agoPresumably the kids get an education on where to place the works. Not next to a window where it's going to eat full sun in the afternoon for example. I also assume that it's the kind of thing that is mostly only known to the kind of kids that are going to take good care of the works.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoStorage has other problems; A painting stored away in a climate controlled vault where no one can look at it is just a dusty canvas rectangle. A painting requires a viewer for it to become art.
- jacquesm 7y ago> A painting stored away in a climate controlled vault where no one can look at it is just a dusty canvas rectangle. It may just as well not exist at all.
- cgriswald 7y agoA copy of the painting can serve for viewing nearly as well as the original. But a copy can’t answer some questions so preserving the original for future study (and new questions, ideas, and technology) is valuable.
- simonh 7y agoThe point is though that future study doesn’t necessarily have a higher value than current study. Especially if the art is likely to degrade over time in some respects anyway.
- Tzela 7y agoThe libraries in Berlin have a similar thing going, for free and open to everybody. https://www.zlb.de/fachinformation/spezialbereiche/artothek.html https://www.zlb.de/fachinformation/spezialbereiche/artothek....
- dan-robertson 7y agoI didn’t know about this when I was a student but my college had a similar programme. I don’t think the artists were so well known. As I recall, the bigger issue was that if you had picture rails then you needed to acquire picture hooks and if you didn’t have picture rails then there wasn’t really a good way to hang paintings I don’t think there were deposits but we maybe had to write down what we had borrowed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]