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Art School's Expensive Art History Textbook Contains No Actual Art
Dr Herbert West writes "Students at Ontario College of Art and Design were forced to buy a $180 textbook filled with blank squares. Instead of images of paintings and sculpture throughout history (that presumably would fall under fair-use) the textbook for 'Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800' features placeholders with a link to an online image. A letter from the school's dean stated that had they decided to clear all the images for copyright to print, the book would have cost a whopping $800. The screengrabs are pretty hilarious, or depressing, depending on your point of view."
Link from summary - Salon: "This article originally appeared on Hyperallergic. "
Hyperallergic - "What is this, October!? According to a blog post"
Original Source: http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/2012/09/16/copyright-and-the-pictureless-art-history-textbook/
They've since invented codes that go along with the book - required to view online information and submit assignments, if the teacher is using their online framework.
Naturally the code is only functional for a single semester, so even if you buy a used book, or share a book, you need your own code to submit assignments.
They'll gladly sell you just the code, for the low fee of... almost as much as a new book+code cost.
Cancerous as hell...
They seem to believe that a url where you can see it online is as good as having it printed right in fromt of you. Were I one of those parents I would just hand then a piece of paper with a link to a picture of $180. Fair is fair.
Oh, I don't know... a printed image in a book has a pretty limited resolution. An on-line image can offer a lot more... take a look at the very high resolution imagery provided by http://googleartproject.com./ You can see the work as a whole or if you'd like to you can zoom in to see more detail than you could see if you were standing in front of the real piece.
OTOH, I have to agree that having the images the text is discussing right next to the images would be much more useful if you want to, for example, study art history.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Indeed. From the Art Institute of Chicago...
Photography
You are welcome to take photographs of the permanent collection and selected loan exhibitions. Please respect signage in exhibitions prohibiting photography of specific works of art. Photographs must use existing light (no flash photography) and are allowed with the condition that the images are for personal, nondistributional, noncommercial use. Flashes, tripods, and video cameras are prohibited.
Members of the media should contact our Department of Public Affairs at (312) 443-3626 or aicpublicaffairs@artic.edu to arrange shoots for still photography and film.
Emphasis mine. I'm not sure what the arrangements would look like for commercial use, but I'd guess they're usually expensive and very specific. As a side note, any school that makes it mandatory to purchase a $180 art book with no photos should suffer a lack of enrollment. That's disgusting, even beyond the usual, disgusting text book scam.
They don't let you use flash because it can cause chemical degradation to the pieces. Many xenon discharge flashes are many times brighter than the sun, so over time people photographing the works with flash illumination would be just as devestating as leaving the works in the sun.