Would you accept a stolen Van Gogh as a gift? Of course not.
What if the work wasn’t so much "stolen," as it was "nationalized" for the good of the homeland? To help fund stimulus grants, say the work was sold twenty years later to an old college friend of yours, and thirty years after that your college friend gave it to your son or daughter as a graduation gift. Should your child accept?
What if your child is the President of Yale University at the time?
The New York Times reports on New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s (affectionately MoMA) plan to unveil its newly designed Web site after five years of an adherence to the classics. Like its name, MoMA is moving into the modern way of doing things online – and that is the interactive way.
Too bring a bit of heresy, and a lot of hypocrisy, onto the Art Law Team’s blog, can I suggest MoMA might want to re-think rushing into embracing the Web 2.0 philosophy?**
The Times reports "[t]he site, which … MoMA officials stress is a work in progress, will now include what its designers call a ‘social bar’ at the bottom, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can ‘collect’ and share after registering for a free account at the Web site (www.moma.org);" and "for the last two years MoMA has been branching out energetically elsewhere on the Web, creating a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed (something the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other museums also maintain) and a Flickr group, where museum visitors can upload their pictures, some of which will end up on the museum’s Web pages … Museum visitors with cell phones will be able to text the number associated with an artwork to an area on the museum’s Web site."
So where’s the issue?