What is Art and Material Culture?
Adding value to art and material culture: Interpretation, analysis and access
Cultural heritage information: Ten characteristics

What is art and material culture?

This document discusses vocabularies and other issues relevant to those who are documenting art, architecture, and related disciplines, including material culture more generally. It is also relevant for those documenting the visual or textual surrogates for art, architecture, and material culture.

For the purposes of this document, art includes the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, textiles, and decorative arts of the type and caliber generally collected by museums. Performance art is also included, but the performing arts are not.

In this document, architecture comprises the built environment that is typically classified as fine art, meaning it is generally considered to have aesthetic value and was designed by an architect and constructed with skilled labor.

Material culture refers to the broader realm of physical objects and edifices produced by a culture. Cultural heritage is a related concept, referring to activities and the artifacts of activities that are a record of the life of a culture.¹

A 1994 report ² on the humanities and arts on the Internet lists some of the benefits of making art and material culture information available:

• Enriching a sense of community through active participation in a networked environment.
• Improving the quality of teaching, and the learning of critical thinking, visual literacy, and analytical skills.
• Fostering intellectual and artistic collaborations that will result in new resources in the arts and humanities.
• Preserving the full complexities and quality of cultural information for the use of future generations while making it accessible to more people today.

This site will demonstrate how vocabularies play a crucial role in support of this agenda, most notably in the area of preservation and access.

Adding value to art and material culture artifacts: Interpretation, analysis, and access

August Sander (German), Wife of Peter Abelen, a Painter in Cologne, 1926, Gelatin silver print, 9 1/32 x 6 7/16 in., J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XM.498.9.

Imagine seeing this photograph in a gallery for the first time. There is no description on the wall next to it, no one to answer any questions, and you know little about this genre. Well, you can certainly "appreciate" the fact that the photographer has a superb sense of the dramatic, that it depicts a single arresting figure, and even that, in your eyes, it is an aesthetically pleasing work of art. But beyond that, the image is " silent" ... it cannot tell the complete story without the benefit of words.

This example illustrates one of the most compelling and complex aspects about the nature of cultural heritage. Textual clues are few and far between in a building, a photograph, or a piece of pottery. Even an archival document, such as a contract for an altar-piece, may not be fully appreciated without other contextual information.

Art and material culture material has an intrinsic value, but only when documented and interpreted can it "tell the story". These intellectual links (e.g., people, places, time, themes) exist in art and material culture resources, and they are made explicit in the analysis and recording of information. The role of art and documentation professionals in organizing and managing information is central to this challenge of providing interpretation, analysis, and access to art and material culture.

Art and Material Culture Information: Ten points

1. Opening new worlds to new audiences. Art, architecture and material culture are not always easily understood or appreciated by non-experts in these fields. Making information available about art and architecture helps to encourage exploration by identifying universal themes, explaining contexts, and revealing little-known facts.

2. Telling a story. The information created about art and material culture materials provides the interpretation and context necessary to "tell a story." Stories can help to make factual information more meaningful and accessible to hard-to-reach audiences.

3. Being multidisciplinary. A diversity of fields create or use information about art, architecture, and material culture. For example, a group of Renaissance drawings showing London and its playhouses will be of great interest to art historians, architectural historians, archaeologists, and people in unrelated fields such as dramatists, and sociologists, among others.

4. Being international. Information about art, architecture, and material culture is recorded, collected, and stored in many different languages. The growing presence of this information on the Web is helping to create new international audiences for resources that were available previously only at a local level.

5. Focusing on an "act of creation." A work of art, be it a statue, a mural, a vase, or a an artist's contract, and the context of its creation (who made it, where was it made, what does it mean, who collected it, etc.) form the core of art and material culture information.

6. Resource for education and entertainment. The primary reason for recording information about art, architecture, and material culture is to document important and valuable objects, in order to protect and care for them. However, this information is often being combined with additional research and related information in order to educate and entertain. The expanded use of multimedia has fueled a demand for images and information from art and material culture institutions. Intellectual property rights, historical accuracy, and multicultural points of view are central issues in the current dialogue about educational and entertainment use of art and material culture information.

7. Having a point of view. The way in which art or materail culture information is presented will reflect a particular point of view. For example, a country may document its art works from a nationalistic point of view. Writers and recorders reflect the language and bias of their respective fields of study. The values of one culture may dictate how it talks about another culture’s art. This subjectivity presents both a challenge for providing multiple points of view, and an opportunity to preserve contextual information.

8. Recording by a variety of media. Information about art may exist in a variety of media. Handwritten descriptions, card catalogs, books, databases, 35 mm slides, and the Web are just some of the ways used to document and record information about art, architecture, and material culture.

9. Scientific analysis or quantification. Some aspects of art, architecture, and material culture information are quantifiable, for example, its dimensions or chemical composition. However, unlike purely scientific information, the full story of art and material culture is best told using words and pictures, not numbers.

10. Art information is complex. The diversity of practice, traditions, methodologies, and the fact that art and material culture information covers such a broad spectrum, from descriptions of objects or events (who, where, and how), to interpretations (what does it mean?) require a complex resource. This complexity presents a challenge when trying to create systems that provide seamless access to such diverse data.