Good things take time but some are definitely worth waiting for. The Dunedin Public Art Gallery has recently launched a new website, or perhaps it is just an addition to its existing one.
Suddenly, lo! The collection is accessible from your armchair, or at least, quite a lot of it.
Formerly, a very few works were listed with information and images provided. Now, very many are.
On Monday last week I talked with Cam McCracken, the relaxed and amiable new director. There were several things I wanted to ask him, one of which was about progress on the project of making the collections digitally accessible.
I had discussed this with his predecessor - and directors before - and was aware Ms Caldwell had given some effort to trying to get it launched.
Before she left I asked her again and she said she was disappointed it had not happened before her departure.
Mr McCracken asked if I had seen the new website, launched a week or two earlier. I hadn't, but though he told me it was a work in progress, with limited data and images, I was enthralled when I got home and managed to access it.
I say "managed" because it is a little difficult to enter, at least for someone like me who is a digital duffer. But once you get there, oh the splendour! This is the information age promise fulfilled for our own rich public art gallery.
Museums exist to collect, care for and communicate their holdings, the three C's of the profession's mantra.
Communicating used to consist of exhibiting, labelling, lecturing and publishing, all rather fixed in time and space. The digital revolution offered new possibilities which were recognised decades ago.
When your columnist was a curator at the gallery before its move from Logan Park in 1996, a great effort was made to register the whole collection - the first complete stocktake for decades - and to photograph and record as much as possible.
The register data is most scanty, but it all went on to a computer for the first time. With that as the base, a project was conceived to get information and images for the whole collection available to the public online.
Essentially, that has now been realised, although, as the website notes, this is a work in progress.
So it is and probably always will be. There continue to be additions to the collections and the scope for finding more information about existing holdings is limitless. But this is certainly a milestone.
In the course of this century it was becoming apparent that overseas institutions had much more about their collections online than New Zealand ones. In the last couple of years there have been improvements in other New Zealand centres. Dunedin was looking stunted. Now, we have crossed the bar.
There are some limitations and even shortcomings, which I do not wish to overemphasise because the magnitude of the effort and the achievement at this point are really very great. The core data, in many cases the only data, are the scant register entries. Many are not only limited but significantly out of date. Old Smythe collection ones still give far too many works to big name artists, long ago downgraded, but later information is on typed cards whose transcription will take more time.
On the other hand, there is new, detailed information about some works, some of which raises your columnist's eyebrows, because it seems unaware of other information which casts doubt on the writers' conclusions.
In light of which I note David Feldman's response to my column concerning the Isleworth Mona Lisa. I do not write the headlines or captions for the column and did not call this work a "fake". I did say it faces an uphill battle to win acceptance as a Leonardo and that it looks like a copy, though looks are not everything.
I note Mr Feldman's evidence which is significant, if not compelling. I do not have the space to review it here, but would like to return to it another time.
People in Otago who are interested in art are interested in such questions, even though the artist lived far away and long ago, which is also true of many of the makers of the works in the gallery's collection, which for me are like family.
It is a practical problem to get more of them out on show so we can go to the Octagon and see them. Mr McCracken is sanguine and reasonable about addressing the constraints and balancing this against the need to host ever more space-demanding touring shows. This is an eternal conflict for an institution which has to serve the competing needs of a museum and an exhibition centre. From our brief encounter I would say the gallery is in safe hands.
• Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
