Ursula Frohne & Reinold Schmücker

The article explains that the digital availability of cultural goods and the opportunity for cultural participation are not one and the same. Access is also determined by historical ownership structures, institutional claims to interpretation, and control over digital infrastructures. Analysing these factors is linked to the normative question of which claims to access and which restrictions are justified, and for what reasons. In this context, curating proves to be an epistemic practice whose decisions regarding contextualisation and forms of visibility invariably raise questions of responsibility.

Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov

Committed to the universalist spirit of the European Enlightenment, the museum seeks to provide equal access to cultural goods for all. But digital accessibility is not inherently synonymous with universal participation. Even in the digital age, access to cultural goods remains shaped by institutional structures. Against this backdrop, the study argues that the museum should be understood as an institutionally governed space of negotiation, in which the claim to ‘access for all’ is brought into reflexive dialogue with particularist claims grounded in collective identities.

Paul Klimpel

Uncertainties about image rights and licenses often impede or obstruct art historical publication projects. This primer on the use of illustrations in art history explains how most images can be reproduced in scholarly publications without costly licenses. Based on German copyright law and other relevant areas of law, the concise textbook explains exclusive rights and their limitations and exceptions, the public domain status of most classical works and their reproductions, as well as the right to quote, which is crucial in an academic context.

Ruben Apressyan

For the first time, this study presents a comprehensive reconstruction of UNESCO’s normative documents in which the issue of access to cultural goods was developed. It traces the development within UNESCO’s documents of conceptions of the principle of access to cultural goods, of the notions of culture and cultural goods, of potential restrictions on access to cultural goods, and of the specific features of such access under the conditions of globalisation and the digitalisation of informational and cultural processes.

Ursula Frohne

Digital archives such as the Arolsen Archives open up new access to the life stories of people who were persecuted and murdered by the National Socialist regime. At the same time, AI-generated images open up new possibilities for political exploitation: Presented as supposed evidence of Nazi crimes, they disseminate distorted representations and serve historical revisionism, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the trivialisation and denial of the Holocaust. This puts public understanding of the historical reality of persecution and extermination at risk. This article examines the ethical and curatorial responsibilities arising from this ambivalence for archives, museums and memorial sites.

Hubertus Kohle

In his study, Hubertus Kohle shows how the wisdom of crowds can be quite productive if managed sensibly. The present article discusses examples from the cultural sector in which laypeople participate in the process of knowledge generation. In libraries and museums in particular, interested laypeople can contribute to tasks ranging from data correction to the interpretation of works of art. The internet offers a wide range of opportunities to tap into the skills of users and volunteers and, in the best case scenario, to turn them into loyal visitors to these institutions.

Angela Dressen

The idea of a museum has changed several times in history. Today it includes online catalogs of objects with descriptions, guided search tools through the catalog, images with public domain licenses, IIIF-compliant images allowing for further processing and collaboration, and, most importantly, the opening of museum data as research data, making the Cultural Heritage institutions a valid research partner.

Thomas Kater

Contemporary German literature often remains largely inaccessible to many people with reading difficulties. This accessibility gap is due to an unresolved tension between the human right to cultural participation, a fundamental right even of people with reading difficulties, and exclusive rights of authors and publishers. A solution would require authors and publishers to generously grant the licenses for simplified versions. This would not only allow people with reading difficulties a significant improvement of their chances to cultural participation, but could also benefit authors.

Josina Dehn

Nora Al-Badri’s artistic practice combines an activist approach to digital appropriation with institutional critique. She examines how museums handle cultural artifacts from colonial contexts and the data derived from their digitization and criticizes institutional control over this data as a continuation of colonial power structures in the digital realm. Based on an analysis of her works, this study examines what impetus this critique can provide for decolonial museum practice. It addresses digital access to collections, collaboration with source communities, the status of digital objects, restitution, and the use of artificial intelligence.

Jolanda Saal

Against the backdrop of current debates on the decolonisation of museums and their collections, this study examines the history of today’s restitution discourse in West German. Taking the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz—Germany’s largest federal cultural foundation—as a case study, it traces decisions, networks and developments in cultural policymaking that shaped the response to international restitution claims during the 1970s and early 1980s. The central question is whether the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz’s official rejections concealed a systematic policy of obstruction.

Johannes Grave

Granting or denying access to certain works of the visual arts does not only affect those who seek such access, successfully or not, but also the objects that are made or not made accessible to the public or to particular audiences. Processes and developments that can shape or block the reception of particular artworks are conceptualised in this article under the perspective of dynamics of access. The accessibility and availability of certain works in a particular historical context can also affect the course of art history, as can be shown, for example, in French Romantic painting.

Regine Ehleiter

The article contrasts net art’s self-image as a genuinely networked form of art – location-independent and readily available – with its present-day inaccessibility: many works are no longer reachable, while the contexts and linkages that once sustained them have eroded. At its center is a case study of attempts to store net art of the late 20th and early 21st century that were pursued at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. The article traces four key drivers of inaccessibility: technical obsolescence, contextual loss, institutional misfit, and legal constraints. Drawing on Variable Media, it discusses storage, emulation, migration, and reinterpretation as preservation strategies aimed at sustaining de facto usability.

Hauke Behrendt

This article develops a normative account of digital cultural participation grounded in a structural trilemma between normalization, empowerment, and deconstruction. While digital infrastructures expand access, they simultaneously intensify tensions between inclusion logics that cannot be fully realized at the same time. Drawing on a relational-egalitarian framework that distinguishes three forms of unjust exclusion – marginalization, domination, and essentialization – the paper argues that just participation cannot be achieved through technical openness alone or by privileging a single inclusion logic, but requires reflexive engagement with their conflicts.

Pavel Zahrádka & Miroslav Krša

This study examines European audiovisual policy with a focus on improving the cross-border availability of European audiovisual works. It analyses two main policy instruments: quota regulation for European works in broadcasting and video-on-demand services and legislative measures aimed at creating a single audiovisual market. The article argues that neither instrument effectively promotes cross-border circulation. It proposes an alternative approach based on opening digital borders after commercial exploitation has ended through a publicly funded fallback TVOD mechanism enabling access in unlicensed territories.

Thomas Gutmann

The term ‘cultural appropriation’ describes a broad class of circumstances in which someone uses or co-opts elements of the culture of a group they do not belong to in supposedly objectionable ways. This essay provides a philosophical and legal analysis of the underlying normative assumptions of such allegations. It concludes that the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ is inconsistent, misleading and useless as a tool for criticism. It then outlines which behaviours and institutions targeted by the misleading accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’ are actually problematic and identifies their wrong-making features. 

Lukas Daum

This paper examines the protection of cultural goods in war through the lens of just war theory, first asking whether military intervention to protect cultural goods can ever be justified (jus ad bellum), then turning to jus in bello. It argues that military interventions undertaken to protect cultural goods are difficult to justify, and that in most cases the loss of human life is the greater evil compared to the loss of cultural goods. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of rescuing remnants and reconstructing damaged sites after the fact.

Ruben Apressyan

This analysis of UNESCO conventions, declarations, and recommendations concerning the protection of cultural property during armed conflict demonstrate that legal regulation alone cannot ensure effective protection. Effective protection depends on embedding respect for cultural property more firmly within the humanitarian education, professional ethos, and ethical training of armed forces personnel.

Mariya Rohozha

This study examines memes that emerged during Russia’s war against Ukraine and identifies three key functions: entertainment combined with a news function, a therapeutic function, and a political, consolidating function. Memes are treated as a form of modern folklore marked by virality, replicativity, mediality, polymodality, mimicry, topicality, seriality, emotionality, humor, and fantasy. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, abusive language and black humor are shown to provide psychological relief in wartime, while raising ethical questions. 

Anna Rakityanskaya

The paper advocates for preservation of internet memes, a highly active, abundant, popular, and fragile element of contemporary culture. As a case study, it presents the SUCHO Meme Wall, a growing open-access digital archive of memes related to the full-scale invasion phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022–). SUCHO exemplifies a digital-archiving activism project that seeks to build a comprehensive diachronic collection of memes. It addresses the complexities of this task by selecting true memes (both “proper” and “emergent”), by developing solutions for preserving the memes’ inherent intertextuality, and by collecting persistently over time.

Siegfried Saerberg

Why does the reality of access to cultural goods – exemplified by audio descriptions produced in cooperation with blind people in museums – remain so far behind the requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? A key reason lies in everyday, implicit knowledge grounded in perception, albeit in profoundly different ways in ‚sighted‘ and ‚blind‘ perceptual styles, respectively. The domain of museum practice constructs, in an ableist manner, primarily or almost exclusively a sighted audience. In this essay, examples of curatorial practice are presented as counterpoints to ocularcentrism.

Johannes Müller-Salo

The paper develops a capabilitarian perspective on digital access to cultural goods and contains two strands of argument. In a first step, I sketch how a capability-oriented theory of justice can integrate the claim that individuals are entitled to access cultural goods into its normative framework. Following Martha Nussbaum, the author conceptualizes claims of justice as being focused on those human capabilities that enable human beings to lead a flourishing life. If the development of some of such capabilities depends upon access to cultural goods, then the provision of these goods falls within the scope of society’s duties of justice. In a second step, I apply the sketched framework to the digital sphere. Here, the strength of the capability approach becomes evident as it enables a systematic integration of individual and institutional perspectives: Fair access to cultural goods is secured where individual competences meet enabling institutional offers in the digital sphere.

Hauke Behrendt

This article examines the tension between cultural access and cultural self-determination. It distinguishes three potentially overlapping normative functions of cultural goods: enabling equal social standing, sustaining communal self-determination, and structuring cooperative use and shared governance. Practice-constitutive, competence-based, and socio-material restrictions are assessed in terms of their justification and effects. An account of justice centered on equal participation requires neither indiscriminate openness nor unconditional protection of cultural boundaries. Procedural respect is developed as an institutional principle.

Lisa-Maria Meier

Ever since Plato’s critique of tragedy as a mere “imitation of appearance”, theatre has been subject to an antitheatrical prejudice. But to what extent is theatre about producing knowledge? Within the framework of aesthetic cognitivism, the concept of “understanding” appears to be more crucial than that of “knowledge”: theatre can foster an understanding of personal phenomena such as justice, love or loneliness, because it exemplifies human action in concrete situations and invites its audience to empathise with the perspectives of those acting and experiencing these situations.

Reinold Schmücker

The sharing of resources and the transparency of research data, methods and findings are fundamental to open science. However, the fact that open science does not require general access to sensitive personal data is now widely recognised. It would, however, be naïve to assume that AI-powered software actually respects such limits and others – for example, those imposed by copyright law. Does knowledge therefore need protection from AI? This essay discusses the reasons that might today argue in favour of restricting the openness of science.