Anyone who wants to listen to Morton Feldman needs to set aside some time. Our article “Feldman hören heißt Zeit einplanen” (Listening to Feldman means making time) takes the forthcoming Munich piano recitals by Sabine Liebner as an opportunity to reflect on this demand. The word is meant kindly. A work is entitled to ask something of us that cannot be dealt with through a more convenient user interface.
For me, this contains a thought that connects several of this week’s articles: making art accessible does not mean making it entirely available for use. Accessibility opens up an encounter. A claim to availability goes further: it seeks to determine when, how and for what purpose something is at our disposal. The distinction is not a linguistic nicety, but a cultural policy choice.
A trace is no substitute
What interests our article about Sandra Prechtel’s archive film on Einar Schleef is precisely the difference between the preserved material and the past theatrical event. A recording can pass something on, but it cannot retrospectively become the performance. This is not a shortcoming that the next technological improvement will reliably remedy. It is a limit of the medium – and possibly the beginning of a different kind of understanding.
We should therefore neither undervalue the archive nor ask the impossible of it. It preserves the opportunity to engage with something. It does not abolish the distance. Anyone examining traces must take account of their gaps. The past does not become present simply because access is possible.
This distinction becomes even sharper when it comes to people whose lives become the subject of a documentary. Our article “Dokumentarfilm: Die Verantwortung endet nicht mit dem Dreh” (Documentary: responsibility does not end with filming) considers an obligation that a signature alone cannot discharge. I regard this as a crucial standard: people do not place their entire selves at our disposal simply by taking part in a film. The ability to reuse an image does not in itself answer the question of whether every use is appropriate.
Accessible, but not ownerless
From here, a path leads to the debate about cultural data. Germany’s federal and state governments want to make it available for an AI infrastructure. Our background article asks who decides how it is used and how creative practitioners are involved. There would be a strong temptation to turn this into the familiar opposition between sensitive art and voracious technology. It would also be convenient. Too convenient.
For the strongest counterargument deserves more than a polite mention: making collections digitally accessible can enable research, public engagement and new artistic work. Keeping collections inaccessible does not automatically protect their dignity. It may just as well protect inherited privileges. The joint policy framework also explicitly names the protection of creative work and the strengthening of copyright as goals. There is no need to mock these intentions in order to ask how they will be put into practice.
What matters, rather, is which distinctions we maintain. Finding a work, viewing it, studying it academically and using it for a technology-based business model: these are different actions. I want cultural policy to treat them differently too. In its statement on Open Data, the German Cultural Council calls, among other things, for fair remuneration and sustained funding for data maintenance. After all, the work does not disappear as soon as its results can be downloaded.
I am therefore arguing not for less access, but against the idea that access establishes an entitlement to every further use. This also includes the possibility of a reasoned refusal. Not as the last privilege of a closed cultural world, but as part of a collaboration in which those involved genuinely have a say.
Feldman’s music and a digital collection are not the same thing. But both allow us to ask whether we are still willing to acknowledge the conditions of an encounter, rather than insisting solely on our own. Culture should become easier to access. The idea that it must therefore be at our service at all times is a different wish. We do not have to grant it.
Original reviewed by the editors · 29 October 2026
