The Ownership Issue

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Foreword

This discussion paper has been prepared in response to the NSW Upper House initiative to hold an inquiry into museums and art galleries – musingplaces. It is also a part of my ongoing research into an appropriate 21 Century governance models for ‘musingplaces’ – the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery as an institution being a case study [LINK]. An important issue that persists and that needs clarification is the one of ownership. For example, Launceston City Council (LCC) asserts that it “owns and operates the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery”. This assertion is contestable in 'law and lore' and there seems to be a considerable body of opinion that would fundamentally challenge this LCC assertion.

Ray Norman – Artist, Metalsmith, Networker, Independent Researcher, Currently a Launcestonian, Cultural Theorist, Cultural Geographer and a hunter of Deep Histories ... Ray is Co-Director of zingHOUSEunlimited, a lifestyle design enterprise and network offering a range of services linked to contemporary cultural production and cultural research. Ray is also engaged with the nudgelbah institute as a cultural geographer. That institute's purpose is to be network of research networks and to be a diverse vehicle through which place oriented scholarship and cultural endeavours can be acknowledged, honoured and promoted.... LINK

A 21st Century Model

Before a 21st Century ‘musingplace’ governance and operational model can be found the question of ‘ownership/s’ needs to be addressed in order to establish credible institutional chains of accountability that fit the circumstance. Given Australia’s museum’s and art galleries’ histories their ownerships have become blurred – some would argue blanded too.

Amongst other aspects of institutional governance and management the perceptions of ownership are amid the most important – if not the most important. 'Ownership' is amongst the most contested concepts in contemporary Western culture. On the face of it ownership, pure and simple, refers to the legal right to the possession of something. Here we are talking about collections of artefacts, scientific specimens, texts, etc.

Ownership is typically taken to mean that a possession belongs to its owner alone and thus cannot be rightfully transferred to another person without the owner's consent. One can buy something, and thus claim exclusive ownership of that thing and one can also have a legal right to a particular substance – be it written material or physical property. 

When an individual, or corporate entity, 'owns something' they have the right to enjoy it as well as discard it. Given that ownership is taken to mean the state of being an owner; the right to own; exclusive right of possession; legal or just claim or title; proprietorship – 1913 Websters. All this serves the concept of 'private ownership' well enough but it is not so useful in regard to 'Public/State ownership' or 'Crown Property'. As a sole 'owner', the owner, has no obligations in regard to the property itself except to herself/himself or the corporate entity and/or its shareholders/partners/co-owners she/he may do anything to/with it they all wish, use it, destroy it, venerate it, whatever, except in the case of live animals.

Property in the context of modern representative democracy, "public property" is synonymous to state property, which is understood to be owned by the people 'in common', thus by 'the government' – Local, State or Federal – on their behalf for their common benefit. In many Commonwealth realms, such property is said to be owned by 'the Crown' – and typically supported by 'common law'.

Examples of this include Crown land, Crown copyright, Crown Dependencies and indeed cultural property held in the collections of public museums and art galleries – albeit that 'cultural property' is better understood in the context of ‘lore’ than it might be in ‘law’.

Community Ownerships

Nevertheless, it is not quite as simple as it has been discussed above. Somewhat like the debates that rage locally, nationally and internationally in regard to the ownership of and access to say water, the 'ownership' of public museum collections is layered and multifaceted – more complex than private ownership. 

Interestingly, not all the layers of ownership held in a museum collection are held outright by the museum even when it is claimed that a museum owns something. For example, in the case of 'intellectual property' and 'moral rights' these things 'belong' to the author and are generally not transferable to anyone except the beneficiaries of her/his estate and endure beyond the death of the author.

After that, there is a collection's Community of Ownership and Interest (COI) where the ownerships involved are a mixture defined by lore and law.

Against this background, say when Launceston City Council claims to "own and operate the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery" this assertion is contestable Indeed, from a marketing perspective this dose not and has not served the institution or the QVMAG's COI all that well.

In relationship to 'governance' the concept of, and understandings of 'ownership' is at the very foundation of understanding all that is at risk and who is accountable and to whom and for what.

One way or another almost all ‘public musingplaces’ are indebted to the ‘public purse’ in that ‘the public’ contributed to the institution as taxpayers, ratepayers, sponsors and donors in inestimable measure. Moreover, in the case of Local Govt. typically ratepayers are ’conscripted investors’ in so much as they pay a levy – typically a hidden levy – as a component of their rates.

For larger jurisdictions individual’s contributions are somewhat more ambiguous and diluted through amortisation. Arguably, musingplace‘s Community of Ownership and Interest (COI) should be understood to include:
• visitors to the musingplace’s campus and visitors to its website/s; • participants in off site programs and projects;
• the people who made, used, owned, collected or who have gifted items held in its collections;
• staff members and volunteers; • the institutions governors/trustees
• researchers, lecturers, teachers and students; • ratepayers, government funding agencies, sponsors and donors;
• cultural institutions, project partners and service providers;
• plus others who identify with and have an interest in the museum and its collections –intellectual and other.

Indeed, individuals within a musingplace’s COI will almost certainly have multiple, and sometimes competing/conflicting, layers of ownership and interest in ‘the place’.

Furthermore, some will be seen as "stakeholders" and even understand themselves as such. Typically, stakeholders are ranked – Key Stakeholders, Primary Stakeholders, Secondary as stakeholders in the end casts them as stakeholders in a different light to that which might be applied to a member of a COI.

Nonetheless, if people/corporations/groups/institutions claim stakeholdership, or are granted stakeholdership, they are simultaneously members of of the COI. COI membership is an inclusive concept with rights and obligations fully acknowledged.

On the other hand, stakeholdership typically aims to assert an exclusive membership – typically free of specific obligations.

By ranking stakeholdership the emphasis shifts towards rights rather than obligations in an attempt to deliver an outcome in a conflict that accommodates stakeholders in accord with their stake-cum-equity in an issue, project, whatever.

Members of a musingplaces' COI should be understood as having both rights and obligations commensurate with their ownership, their interest and/or their relationships with the musingplaces' enterprise, its collections, its programs etc. Somehow they distributed throughout the stack rather than a place assigned to them.

It is counterproductive to attempt to rank one ownership as being more important than another as 'importance' will always depend on the issue at hand and ultimately it will be assessed differently and subjectively from different people's/members’ perspectives.

Ownerships

As above, a member of the COI may also be referred to as a “stakeholder” but stakeholdership in its current usage has generally come to mean a person, group, business or organisation that has some kind vested or pecuniary interest in say a project or a place.

Typically, stakeholders self identify, self assess their importance/ranking and assert their rights. However, they are rarely called upon to meet any obligation. A COI member, as an 'owner' – cognitive ownership rather than say freehold ownership – is less likely to self identify but nonetheless they will have obligations that they are expected to meet along with the rights they expect to enjoy.

Typically, 'stakeholders' assert their rights when there is a contentious decision to be made that directly impacts upon them, their reputation, their earning capacity, whatever. 

'Stakeholders' are rarely called upon to meet or acknowledge an obligation. Conversely, members of a COI will often have innate understandings of their obligations in concert with the rights they expect to enjoy – indeed, they typically assume that they have these ‘rights’ even when they're not articulated.

Typically in the case of public musingplaces’ their COI memberships – ratepayers, et al – meet their obligation by paying a ‘levy’ embedded in their taxes, rates or rent. And then there are the sponsors, donors, independent researchers, auxiliary members, students, field naturalists, et al!

Stakeholder groups and Communities of Ownership and Interest are concepts with kindred sensibilities. Nonetheless, they engage with different community networks with different expectations and relationships and/or different sensibility sets – even if sometimes many of the same people are involved more once.

BACK REFERENCE
• ITEM 2009: CULTURAL PROPERTY AND LAYERS OF OWNERSHIP ...  [LINK]
• ITEM 2013: AUDITING COMMUNITIES OF OWNERSHIP & INTEREST ...  [LINK]