The Centre for Advanced Study investigates how digitalisation is changing access to cultural goods – primarily, but not exclusively, with regard to art. In doing so, it examines both the opportunities and prospects for development, as well as the problems and conflicts that arise as a result.

Three guiding research perspectives

The Centre for Advanced Study pursues three interlinked objectives:

1. It aims to significantly broaden the scope of art-historical research – by analysing the significance of access to digital technologies for art production and art reception; by examining the opportunities that digital transformation opens up for access to contemporary art as well as to older art; and by reflecting on art-specific issues of accessibility beyond the time-based and ephemeral art forms that have been the primary focus of research to date.
2. It aims to highlight the consequences that the changing possibilities of access to – and restrictions on access to – art and other collection items have for curatorial practice.
3. It aims to enrich the debate within copyright policy and legal scholarship by introducing an ethical perspective on conflicts over access, and to develop concrete ethical principles that can provide impetus for legal policy and serve as a basis for the ethical evaluation of legal access regulations.

Access in the Digital Age: An Ambivalent Development

Digital versions of texts, images or audio recordings can be reproduced without any loss of quality and made accessible worldwide at virtually no cost. Above all, however, they can be processed by machines: they can be broken down, analysed and recombined – and, with generative artificial intelligence, used to produce large numbers of new, genuinely digital artefacts. This not only changes access to cultural goods, but also our understanding of them.

Digitisation can broaden, multiply and invigorate access. However, it can also act as an instrument of control and a medium of censorship, and is itself dependent on physical infrastructures that carry significant economic and environmental burdens. The expansion of access is therefore not necessarily linked to an increase in participation; access can also give rise to new dependencies as well as mechanisms of control and exclusion. Where accessibility depends on proprietary formats, licences, platforms, search and recommendation systems, decisions about what is accessible are increasingly shifting from rights holders and cultural institutions to infrastructural actors and technical systems.

The Centre for Advanced Study describes this development using the term second-order access conditions: the technological prerequisites to which the production, distribution and reception of cultural goods in the digital age are bound.

Curating and Ethics

A key finding of the Centre for Advanced Study’s work to date is that, in the context of digital change, curating and ethics are much more closely linked than might initially appear. Digital availability is not synonymous with cultural participation. Rather, access proves to be a relationship between cultural goods, those interested in them, and the institutions that determine their accessibility – shaped by historical ownership structures, institutional claims to interpretation, and control over digital infrastructures. Where the origin and transmission pathways of cultural goods become invisible in digital circulation, curating becomes a central practice of contextualisation: it, in turn, creates access to sources and provenance and can act as a corrective to misleading representations. Curating thus proves to be an epistemic practice, whose decisions regarding contextualisation and visibility invariably raise questions of responsibility. This raises the question of whether – and if so, why and how – access to art and other cultural goods may, or indeed must, be curated, and on what normative basis this question can be answered.

Towards an Ethics of Access

A systematic domain-specific ethics of access to cultural goods remains an ongoing desideratum. The Centre for Advanced Study is currently working on this. Fundamental to this are the distinctions between availability and participation, between ownership and access, and between institutional control and legitimate decision-making authority. Furthermore, the research is based on two working hypotheses: firstly, in value-pluralistic societies and with a claim to cross-cultural validity, the ethical questions raised by the human right to cultural participation can only be answered by principles of moderate scope, derived through reflective equilibrium. Secondly, in the digital age, access to cultural goods is usually not a scarce good, but a non-rival good. Equity of participation cannot therefore be guaranteed primarily through rules of distribution; rather, an ethics of access requires specific rules for weighing up and deciding on conflicts of interests and norms, some of which are very diverse.

Methodologically, the Centre for Advanced Study therefore combines descriptive analysis and normative theory-building: ethical principles are initially formulated as hypotheses on the basis of case studies from the arts and cultural studies, and are then refined, validated or rejected through interdisciplinary dialogue. Such an ethics is not in itself a legal endeavour, but aims to provide scientifically grounded proposals for practical standards – for example, in the museum sector – and for the further development of the law.