Provenance, or art’s history of ownership, is a growing area of discussion for museums across the world. As the Philadelphia Museum of Art so eloquently describes, “the provenance of an individual work of art sheds light on its historical, social, and economic context as well as its critical fortunes through time.”
MoMA and the exciting possibilities with museum metadata
The Museum of Modern Art in New York uploaded collection data from nearly 124,000 artworks to GitHub, a code-sharing and Git repository hosting service, in July with less than expected fanfare. It’s not the first time a museum has given the public access to this type of information, and MoMA’s release isn’t the most extensive.