My college does this as well. It's been happening since 1940 [1], so 79 years, longer than Cambridge. More info in [2]. The collection even includes some works by Picasso.
It's very popular here — students camp out overnight to maintain their spot in line, and the art up for rental tends to run out quickly.
MIT has something similar for its students - they lottery off an entire gallery of art to students to keep in their dorm rooms for the year every fall [0].
I have no idea what the damage statistics are for it, but this just reminded me of it.
In this context, prints mean "original prints" which doesn't translate to junk or reproductions. Some original prints are worth in excess of half a million dollars.
Trust with accountability and respect seems to go a long way some times but not others. Anyone have a theory why this system worked so effectively but other systems involving trust don't?
I think it has to do with reputation and the cost of entry.
I use to play on a minecraft server that had a griefer trap right at spawn. The server automatically monitored any attempts to grief and auto banned griefers while sending a server wide announcement.
When the server was wide open and anyone could join, the ban notice would spill out so fast we had to get an admin to silence it.
When we swapped to a whitelist that required a person to submit an application and wait to be approved, messages were rare. Only one or two a week.
When we swapped to invite only, we never had the message go off. Not once from what I remember.
As we swapped between the three states (in an attempt to maintain a certain server population level), the pattern was kept up.
The lower the cost to get in, the more people who violated trust. The higher the price, the less people who violated trust. When personal reputation was on the line, no one violated trust.
I've been pondering the same economics on car-, bike- and scooter- shares. I'd love to know if Car2Go's ridiculous little SMART cars were treated better or worse than their Benz replacements. I wonder if Lime's electric bikes get shoved off the pier less than Ofo's cheapest ones.
* the scheme is not widely known/advertised among the student body, so it's closer to word-of-mouth recommendations than mass anonymous access. (Note that there are over 12,000 undergrads but they only lend out 100 or so pieces -- it's a self-selected 1% or so of students)
* there is a deposit plus the hassle factor of actually going to collect the piece, so you're not going to do it unless you actually wanted to display the art; this is a minor barrier to entry but it makes a difference I think
* students are easy to find and easy to impose penalties on in the event of actual malice, because you can just ask their college to intervene
* they take some obvious precautions to avoid major risk -- no lending of very valuable pieces, no lending of sculptures (which I guess to be at higher risk of being knocked over and accidentally damaged compared to pictures hung on a wall)
Trust works well if you have decent people. Exactly what makes people decent is hard to say, but it is not unthinkable that students who got into Cambridge are a bit more decent than average.
Well getting into Cambridge probably indicates some degree of respect for humanity's body of work to date. That's a pretty narrow definition of decency though.
It is clearly the qualities of the participants that allows this to work out at such a wild unsecured risk. The group and individual personal characteristics of the participant cohort make up the dark matter of why this system can function without disaster.
I know that goes against what people want to believe that we are all the same, but fact of the matter is that most people are in fact not at all the same outside of a confirmation bias bubble that people often are not even aware they are in. Exhibit A are the several liberals that have been slaughtered while proving that muslims are not violent by hitchhiking or hiking through muslim lands.
It is easy enough of a thing to test and prove, even without putting the actual art at risk. You could just reproduce fake art and provide it to various different groups of people, including at various costs, to see what happens. It would surely show either that we are actually all the same, or that we are not all the same. Cue the subsequent rationalization and excuse making when the results contradict the cult doctrine.
I find that an extremely interesting study. The more screaming and preemptive hedging and excuse making you encounter, the more you know you will find heretical results.
> Exhibit A are the several liberals that have been slaughtered while proving that muslims are not violent by hitchhiking or hiking through muslim lands.
Yet far fewer in number than the amount of muslims who've been shot dead by Christians and white supremacists even just within the last year, yet it's interesting that "muslims are violent" is the theory you latch on to. Why's that?
> It would surely show either that we are actually all the same, or that we are not all the same. Cue the subsequent rationalization and excuse making when the results contradict the cult doctrine.
"Liberals" don't believe we are all the same. Such an experiment would show the differences in culture, socialisation and upbringing that "liberals" very much believe in. Your ignorance of such things, or dismissal of them as "excuse making", shows that you lack the nuance needed to properly assess such a study.
When it comes to long-term storage of art, damage can be calculated in more ways than whether a piece of art is noticeably defaced.
The biggest threat to these pieces lies in being stored outside of a climate, light, and humidity-controlled environment. When the lifespan of a thing is hundreds or thousands of years, this matters just as much.
However, if the museum doesn't normally keep its stored pieces in a controlled environment, then this should be no different.
But kudos to these organizations for trusting the students enough to do this.
A copy of the painting can serve for viewing nearly as well as the original. But a copy can’t answer some questions so preserving the original for future study (and new questions, ideas, and technology) is valuable.
The point is though that future study doesn’t necessarily have a higher value than current study. Especially if the art is likely to degrade over time in some respects anyway.
>A copy of the painting can serve for viewing nearly as well as the original.
Maybe for a lay-viewer. As an amateur realist painter, even the very best prints seem to lose 75-80% of the mark-making and process clues that are easily observable in originals.
Presumably the kids get an education on where to place the works. Not next to a window where it's going to eat full sun in the afternoon for example. I also assume that it's the kind of thing that is mostly only known to the kind of kids that are going to take good care of the works.
I didn’t know about this when I was a student but my college had a similar programme. I don’t think the artists were so well known. As I recall, the bigger issue was that if you had picture rails then you needed to acquire picture hooks and if you didn’t have picture rails then there wasn’t really a good way to hang paintings
I don’t think there were deposits but we maybe had to write down what we had borrowed.
I have questions: 0) How widespread is this program announced, and which students take advantage of it? Maybe students of art are more cautious. Maybe business students don't know about the program. 1) Are they all framed and behind glass/plastic/whatever? If so, they're mostly protected from casual damage. 2) Are these originals or copies? 3) Is there a policy, communicated to the borrowers, that damage has punitive consequences? If so, that could be a deterrent.
It's not particularly popular/widely advertised. The handful of people I know who have done it are all art enthusiasts. Probably the mild inconvenience of getting the painting back to your room is a factor here. There's a £30 deposit per painting https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/kettles...
100%. They would be impressed you were able to recreate a great work on your own, and it might end with an assistantship in a studio somewhere on campus.
Interesting article it sounds like they're putting a lot of (warranted) trust in the students. They were a bit coy about it, but I'd be curious to see what the values of the paintings are.
This is slightly off-topic but it was interesting to learn that "homely" has a very different meaning in the UK. Similar to "homey" in the US
But that's not what a phrase like "purely based on trust" means; that means "purely based on trust in the person" (rather than trust in various "social collateral" that creates obligations in the person).
Speaking as a semi-famous artist. Art is a feast. After the feast you poop. Then the collectors come and hoard the poop for all eternity, occasionally lending the precious stuff out to students.
There's a HN story from the past year or two about someone literally printing out other people's Twitter and/or Facebook pages and selling the prints in galleries for $thousands. I don't know the correct search terms to find it but it's out there.
EDIT: Richard Prince[0] I guess I've been on HN longer than I thought.
It's very popular here — students camp out overnight to maintain their spot in line, and the art up for rental tends to run out quickly.
[1]: https://www.oberlin.edu/news/art-rental-behind-scenes-look
[2]: https://www.oberlin.edu/news/visionary-behind-art-rental