I do think we agree. (Though as a good friend once said, “We agree! It’s too bad. Now we have nothing to talk about.”)

There’s an argument I suppose for using the site as a public repository for studies that are otherwise unavailable – which seems to be in tune with A&E’s intention and (from what I can tell from the papers currently available) those of their contributors. But then it becomes a junk drawer rather than a database.

Despite my critical tone above, I would like something like this to exist, and appreciate aspects of the project A&E has set in motion. Few contexts for writing come without some ambiguity – indeed I wondered as I was writing if Open Space did not represent such an “added value” for SFMOMA (inconclusive…) But I would not send forward my writing unless the the conditions were different.

I think we’re largely in agreement here. For me the key issue remains one of compensation because I am, in general, distressed by the expectation that corporations can aggregate my data for marketing purposes without consulting or compensating me. If my information is so valuable to them, they ought to pay me for it. So I see this debate through a similar lens. In my mind it still comes down to the fact that we are learning to expect less and less support for our work while corporate interests profit from our efforts, free of obligation to us. So that’s where I’m coming from. This seems to me like yet another example of “give us your work for free, and we’ll profit, and you should be happy that we acknowledge your existence.” I am firmly on the side of not participating, unless a more compelling counter-argument surfaces.

Our argument in June reversed this arrangement. We wrote, “…what purports to be a neutral gathering up of disciplinary knowledge comes to seem more like the consolidation of another audience Artforum and e-flux can sell to advertisers (updating for the 21st century Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s assertion that “television delivers people”).”

That is, the people who receive the mailings and browse the site, represent, as an aggregate, value to clients and advertisers. It is to them (clients and advertisers) that A&E presents added value in the sense discussed above. If the database appeals to historians, it would be on some balance of collegial openness, and desire for publicity.

It seems the fact that you can’t put a price on history means historians don’t get paid.