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]

The Importance Of An Inquiry Into Musingplaces

Speaking as I do from a place outside where some would argue that I no longer have any business to be speaking about musingplaces – NSW musingplaces that is. I challenge that perception and as they say, I have form – and I have company. These places belong to many and those with interests in them are as far flung as they are near.

To a large extent my life has been shaped by musingplaces of many kinds and in many places, sometimes overtly, other times subliminally, on others covertly. Sometimes the experiences in, and via, them have been awkward and tenuous – peculiar even.  Mostly however, despite their sometimes inadequacies, they are nourishing places.

Over time just about every personal interest along with most private passions and somewhat insulated sentiments have in some way been ‘dealt with’ in one musingplace or another. This is not unusual as I have lots company. However, very often all this happens at a subliminal level and slips by as if it mightn’t have happened. 

More and more all this happens outside the built environment and within ‘cyberspace’. Yet the usefulness of access to ‘real things’, ‘proper books’, ‘haptic experiences’, etc. is unlikely to subside any time soon. Its these things that are launching pads for the test of something not previously considered.

Our musingplaces, and in particular our museums, art galleries and heritage sites, have become ‘bureaucratised’ – and counterproductively so … arguably. 

Debatably, there has been a creeping diminishment and a concerning trivialisation of these musingplaces’s cultural significance in their 21st Century context.

For reasons not too difficult to imagine they have very often been translated into (reimagined as?) ‘theme parks’ of a kind. It’s particularly so when the value of ‘tourist dollars’ are in the sights of whoever sees that as some kind of pragmatic fiscal imperative.

Likewise, the scholarship imperative is too often displaced by "the delightful" and the experience of  "enjoyment and amusement".  Now there is nothing all that much wrong about all that and these 'feelings' are absolutely legitimate. It is just the case that there is more to musing than just that – and its a democratic activity.

Clearly there has been ‘community kick back’ arising out of the NSW Government’s decision to sell-off a musingplace to the highest bidder. Given that it is sited in an area with high real estate values it seems it is imagined that it can be ‘transport’ it to somewhere else – imagined and sold as relocation. 

Why do it? Well on the face of it, it’s in order to achieve some political imperative, via a symbolism of some kind. However, at many levels that tells us a great deal all by itself. 

Musingplaces are in fact ‘treasure houses’ but the gold in them is hidden in sometimes the unlikeliest of places. In fact much of the ‘treasure’ is in their ‘placemaking’ and their ‘placemarking’. In turn, and quite unsurprisingly, all this resists relocation. The unmaking of 'place', especially musingplaces, is ever likely to be contested.

The risk inherent in this inquiry in NSW is that it might focus its attention on just one case study – the Powerhouse Museum. And there is another risk to do with the status quo. However, as the terms of reference indicate there is more at stake than just that – and the inquiry is both timely and very much welcomed. 

In the 21st Century there are very good reasons to reimagine musingplaces – the Powerhouse Museum included. Their 21st Century purposefulness needs to be imagined as something more than the status quo. Entrepreneurship is so often seen as something misfits do as they make their way in the world – and always questioning the status quo. Even Ronald Reagan knew it for what it was when he said "you know, status quo is Latin for 'the mess we're in'".  

Bureaucratically and politically it's typically convenient to regard musingplaces as ‘cost centres’ and consequently a drain on ‘the budget’, and therefore an unproductive and a questionable indulgence.  It's aid "they just cannot make a profit". Accordingly, they are subjects for rationalisation along with their modes of operation and reasons for being. For the most part this kind of thinking bypasses the ‘values’, cultural and social values, that are invested in musingplaces. Moreover, it bypasses the profits to be had – the fiscal, cultural and social dividends. 

Typically, cost centres cannot succeed, as they can only survive, they, by design, can never succeed – or even be allowed to do so. Nonetheless, the communities within which musingplaces exist typically want theirs to succeed. In a 21st Century there is no reason to believe that they cannot succeed. There are some new dynamics in play.

However, the yardsticks by which 'success' is measured is important. Dickens's Micawber Principle and the 'cost centre concept' are intertwined.  Based as they are upon the observation: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery" they consign far too many musingplaces to mediocrity - albeit that there are some virtues to be found in the safety offered by the Micawber Principle.

Nonetheless, Micawber's investment in survival needs to be challenged if productivity is what underpins success.

Ray Norman

Musingplaces, Placedness And Collecting

A musingplace, properly speaking, should not 'believe' in itself. Any ethical researcher will tell you that our histories are littered with stories to do with doubt and mistakes and accidental discoveries. Musingplaces hold within them histories of doubt and mistakes and accidental discoveries. 

In the 21st Century as much as any time before what is not required is faith in people with prestigious degrees. Sadly, they are just as likely to be evil and corrupt as anyone else. Rather, we should be investing our trust in critical thinking, which, by the way, is at the core of the scientific method – indeed research methodology per se. 

Specifically, what is currently required, and more than ever, is the ability to follow the threads of ideas back to their sources. After that, we need the ability to ask who benefits and who loses when a certain idea wins out. That’s a skill that can be learned by anyone, and one that is effectively suppressed in our current educational economy. It’s also the only possible way out of the current impasse that surrounds the sciences, information technologies, the diversity current cultural production and the feedback loops created by the crisis of authority. 

Musingplaces –public museums, public art galleries, monuments, public gardens and parks (botanical, zoological, environmental, industrial etc.), publicly owned buildings (heritage sites, industrial sites, civic buildings, etc.) – typically hold collections that have a range of belief systems and cultural understandings invested in them. Typically, all this is defined by the collections’ ‘placedness’ – put another way ... its sense of place ... the narratives attached to place, ... etc. In its turn all this has a part to play in determining how places are understood and by whom. 

When it comes to a musingplace like Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (PHM) its ‘placedness’ is far from being insignificant. Indeed the PHM's history and ts specific location within what is in fact an evolving cultural landscape has been a defining factor in the development of its collections and consequently its Community of Ownership and Interest (COI).

Arguably, it is the Powerhouse Museum’s collections in concert with the institution’s geography that lends the institution its ‘placedness’. In turn it is all this that defines the institution’s COI being:
• Its funding agencies, donors and sponsors over time;
• The institution’s trustees, administrators, staff, et al;
• The people, organisations, institutions, with intellectual and cultural property invested in the institution and its collections;
• The people understood to be ‘the audiences’ for PHM projects and programs;
• The people who have developed various relationships with the institution – research, business, social, research, et al;
• The people who have a pecuniary interest in the institution and its collections;
• Kindred institutions and collection in the non-government sphere … et al.

COIs members are multilayered and it’s not unusual for members to have multiple ‘ownerships’ some of which might well be in conflict another. Nonetheless, once acknowledged such conflicts are not by necessity problematic. However, acknowledgement tends to defuse potentially explosive and disruptive tensions. It is especially so when there is acknowledgement of not only COI members’ individual rights but also their inherent obligations. Leaving a class of membership aside because it might invite conflict to include them is a denial of these obligations and problematic.

There is often a temptation to rank these COI relationships but doing so puts in place an administration that routinely sets out to privilege one group over another and in ways that in the end are counterproductive. Such privileging of one group of people can only be subjective even if based on 'law and regulations'. The ownerships and interests to be invoked here are founded in 'lore' rather than 'law' and typically with greater levels of acceptance and compliance.

With this in mind, the cultural landscape that such an institution exists within is loaded with complex and rich narratives along with the complexity of ownerships. That is the narratives:
• That intersect and equally those that are divergent and oppositional; and
• Those that are founded in a multiplicity of histories; and
• Those that draw upon myths and allegories; and
• In fact all that which lends richness to a collection and the networks of communities that belong to it.

Given the advances in technology, the extraordinary growth in data storage capacities and the increased capacities of communication infrastructures in the 21st Century, all of the above is in a state of flux. It is often not considered in any depth that cultural landscapes are dynamic and that they evolve in response to human activity. Yet undeniably they do! Moreover, they may even develop in ways that do not place humanity at the centre of the template cum eco-system and/or even revert to something more reflective of a past era or dynamic.

Pared right back musingplace collections contain within them raw data and information that when considered together, and within a 21st C framework, they can facilitate new knowledge and/or new understandings – wisdom also as often as not.

Taking Sydney’s PHM as an exemplar for a musingplace in a cultural landscape it needs to be acknowledged that both its cultural and physical geographies have undergone dynamic change. Some of it relatively recent.

What appears to be virtually unacknowledged in the PHM collections is the recognition of the Eora cultural landscape that endured for millennia on the PHM/MAAS site and beyond it.

That landscape, as is now widely recognised, was not empty and ownerless at the time of colonisation. Eora placedness, and the Eora placescaping that shaped it, was and has been subsequently ignored and it has been displaced. Eora placedness was enveloped by the subsequent colonial, post colonial, industrial and post industrial cultural landscapes that the PHM is currently, embedded within. As yet its a largely unrelated narrative. .

Nonetheless, the PHM collections do proactively acknowledge and explore Australia’s enduring Aboriginal cultural realities and their outputs. It is just the case that there is much yet to be achieved within changing sensibilities and in the context of current cultural understandings.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of the PHM’s cultural landscape, the narratives that belong to it – and the PHM’s COI as well – appears to be at best subliminal currently. However, this is unsurprising given that the institution is reflective of its time and the social sensibilities in play.

Given musingplaces’ embeddedness in ‘place’ they need to be understood as both ‘placemakers’ and ‘placemakers’. While their collections might well have relevance beyond the places to which they belong, and belong in, their relevance is nonetheless deeply rooted in their placedness. They may be plundered and removed but their narratives tend to go with them albeit subliminally and also that their meanings can shift.

And then there are musingplaces’ collections and their Community of Ownership and Interest (COI). Given that each belong to each other almost inextricably in ‘lore’ separating them is ever likely to be contentious.

The institutions that hold, manage and care for the collections and their COI are charged with a range of obligations that come with the rights. All too often this aspect of ‘collection management’ is downplayed for bureaucratic convenience, because of funding implication, etc.

In the end in order to have substance and meaning collections need to belong in and to places. A musingplace without a purposeful collection is no musingplace at all and a collection without a COI is but a meaningless assemblage of ‘things’.

‘Place’ plays the defining role in collecting the stories, the chattels, the understandings, the wisdoms, that lend meaning and substance to musingplaces and the collections entrusted to them – and that their COIs have invested in them.

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

MUSINGPLACES: A Perspective

Musingplace? What do you mean?  Where do you mean? What are they? Why call them that? What are they for?

English is, thankfully, a living language and the places where we go to muse upon something, to contemplate an idea, to recollect and collect stories, to ponder something, to meditate, to mull over an idea, to consider something, to discover something new, hold particular places in our cultural imaginations. Musingplaces figure large in our cultural realities and they have done so for a very long time.

These places are commonly understood as 'museums and/or galleries' but in reality they are more diverse than that would suggest. It also seems that such places are more than important to communities and their ability to sustain the fundamentals of humanity. Quite often, as communities, we have institutionalised such places.

In the context of industrialised societies these 'places' have come into being as a consequence of an individual’s, or a group’s, sometimes an organisations'/corporations'/business’s initiative and in particular its interest in ‘something’. When it’s like this, their ‘ownerships’ are very clear. Likewise, their functionality and purpose as an entity is typically quite clear and usually very well understood.

In 17^th Century Europe musingplaces were understood as kunstkammers and wunderkammers and typically linked to communities of scholars. More modern manifestations of these places have evolved into what the developed cum Westernised world has come to know them as, museums and art galleries, places that exist more and more in a kind of isolation.

In contemporary Australia perhaps the most famous of such private musingplaces is Tasmania’s MONA – Museum of Old and New Art  – a 21^st C Kunstkammer of a kind. However, most of us collect something or other, for some purpose or other, and maintain private and personal ‘musingplaces’ in our lives, our homes or somewhere important to us.  The 'collecting purpose' is multifarious and it is often ambiguous and multidimensional  – private contemplation, research, public display, whatever. 

Collectively, these collections and  musingplaces when they find a ‘keeping place’ in our ‘homes’,  in whatever form that takes, collectively constitute an enormous resource variously available to the wider community. These 'collections' are much more important than is generally acknowledged. Collectively they are a much more significant cultural resource than is either acknowledged or understood.

Other times, some would argue most often, musingplaces come into being as a consequence of communities seeking support for the establishment and maintenance of such places in some form of 'community ownership'. Usually, they are tasked with preserving assemblages of communities''cultural property'. 

Likewise, these public collections have enormous and identifiable 'Communities Of Ownership & Interest' (COI) – variously understood as members, stakeholders, sponsors, donors, researchers, staff, management, etc. Most often these musingplaces are imagined as ‘keeping places’ for a collection, sometimes a collection of collections – public museums, public art galleries, monuments, public gardens and parks (botanical, zoological, environmental, industrial etc.), publicly owned buildings (heritage sites, industrial sites, civic buildings, etc.) 

Musingplaces are unambiguously the keeping places of collections and the narratives linked to them. At their best they are a part of a kind of rhizomatic and interrelating network of networked collections.

Interestingly, given the diversity of the interests, sometimes quite divergent and disparate interests, that bring these musingplaces into being, their ‘purpose’ can become somewhat ambiguous or even obscured. A musingplace and its collection/s without a clearly articulated purpose is fundamentally diminished in the values that may be attributed to it. It is particularly so in regard to public collections cum musingplaces. 

As perceptions of ‘ownership’ shift – socially and culturally – musingplaces can become contested spaces, and are invariably places where ideas are contested – intellectual property, cultural realities, fiscal understandings, political perceptions, social license and more still.

In the so-called ‘developed world’, arguably, every aspect of human cultural realities has a place set aside somewhere for ‘musing’ upon some aspect of a prevailing cultural imperative – a social phenomena or some other imagining. 

These musingplaces are simply places to enable those with an interest in some aspect of a community’s social cum cultural life (its lore?) to contemplate it, to investigate it, to better understand and navigate it, to protect it, to interrogate it even.

In many ways musingplaces are a kind of secular temple albeit that quite often there is a sense of spirituality, an element of the sacrosanct and quite often with some form of otherworldliness about them.

Nonetheless, for the most part, they are rather pragmatic places that feed upon, and draw upon, our primordial curiosities and inquisitiveness – or put another way, our urges to better understand the world and ourselves in it.

In a 21^st Century context musingplaces might well have geographic addresses, a set of geographic coordinates, and also a location/s in cyberspace – a set of URLs – Uniform Resource Locators.   Such an institution might well take a ‘pride of place’, indeed earn it, in a world with shifting global alignments, changing social aspiration, not to mention more actively interfacing cultural dynamics.

Arguably 21st Century musingplaces need to evolve and adapt to fit within the current circumstances. Arguably, contemporary musingplaces are in dire need of reimagination, reconfiguration and possibly reinvention.  Arguably, musingplaces need to evolve and adapt in order to do more than survive and to be allowed to succeed as meaningful culture institutions in a contemporary context.

Moreover, there is now a good case for the development of some kind of enabling regulatory arrangement cum formalised scheme that empowers and encourages 'collections' – private and public – to become more relevant – socially and culturally.

Indeed, in a 21st Century context there are significant opportunities to reinforce the networking – ideally rhizomic networks invested in collections.

Digital knowledge and information systems are able to facilitate more complex rhizomic interfaces than a human brain can sustain. This in its turn allows for more productive outcomes. Importantly, these emerging knowledge systems are able to privilege 'lore' over 'law' when and where required. They are also able to facilitate a continuity that allows ‘data’ to be transformed into ‘information’ and in turn convert it into ‘wisdom’. All this holds the promise of enabling collections and their narratives to:
• Appreciate in value socially and culturally – and possibly fiscally;
• Generate new knowledge and understandings;
• Democratise and expand knowledge systems.

 

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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