Oblique Ambitions

The Origins and Intentions of Opus Cultura

Key Points:

• Goal of this site

• Centralized institutions

• Decentralized institutions

• Constellations

I see the art and artifact collections care community at a pandemic-prompted crossroads: we change our practices while we have this opportunity or return to our previous practices. Many of us have long desired more economical and sustainable practices, and now, finally, these notions have reached our institutional administrations like a frog finally realizing he was being boiled which means we have generated the inertia necessary for big changes.

From a collections care point of view, I think we can all point to many areas of bloat that have metastasized in our systems. In response to some of these long-standing issues, this space will ambitiously suggest ideas and concepts for improving how we manage the world’s patrimony.

I see decentralizing the care of collections as the future. Placing our trust in third parties facilitates this possibility. We develop trust by unifying and elevating standards. We unify and elevate standards by democratizing access to information and education. I will call this third-party-ization an “oblique” solution. Like a car in traffic, sometimes it is more efficient to go around the problem than be stuck going the “direct” route. Third parties are oblique.

Roughly speaking, I see our previous practices as highly centralized. By “centralized” I mean that we base our collections geographically in a building(s) at or near our institution and our own institutional employees tightly oversee them. We make occasional exceptions to this that we call “loans”.

With a centralized collection, we imply an inherent distrust in others reflected in aggressive loan contracts and insurance requirements. We centralize because we have created and incentivized expectations of care that we rightly or wrongly believe only our employees or immediate network can maintain.

I want to push the field toward the decentralization of collections and their care, however. “Decentralization” will incentivize using trusted “third parties” (to use an intentionally broad term) to tend to collections wherever they land which will make the care more economical, efficient, and sustainable. I will elaborate on these so-called “third parties” and decentralization in other posts as they define my motives for creating this site and require more individual attention. That said, trusting others is at the heart of this, and I believe that I have devised some ways to do this which I will outline in forthcoming articles.

To finish, I want to emphasize the idea of decentralization and encourage you to see this network of professionals, vendors, tools, and ideas as “constellations.” Seeing our profession like this pushes us to recognize that we are linked and that we all affect each other. Each project is a new constellation made up of a network trusted “stars” to execute it.