The policy landscape

Part of a symposium on how digital technologies affect the practices of art and art history. The rapid expansion of information technology (IT) is having an impact on the ways that information about cultural subjects is created, organized, used, and stored, which in turn directly affect museums, the art market, arts organizations, government agencies, universities, and, increasingly, academics, artists, curators, and dealers. The IT revolution has generated a dynamic between, on the one hand, extreme fragmentation and multiplication of efforts, and, on the other, a need to define policies that will help chart a path through the chaos and rush. The writer studies the effectiveness of five groups—the European Union, the G7, Protecting Cultural Objects in the Global Information Society, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, and the Arts and Humanities Data Service—specifically formed to make policy in this area.