Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, visited Caltech as part of the Presidential Distinguished Speaker series. An accomplished leader and scholar, Fleming oversees the Getty Research Institute, an international center for the study of visual culture; the Getty Conservation Institute, which advances conservation practice; the Getty Museum, including the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Getty Villa in Malibu; and the Getty Foundation, which supports art historical scholarship, the conservation of art and architecture, increased access to museum collections and archives, and training in the visual arts.
Caltech's Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series brings to campus eminent speakers who discuss timely topics in science and engineering, culture, public policy, and American higher education.
Selections from Fleming's conversation with Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum are below. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and length.
TR: How do you see the role of the Getty in the world?
KF: The Getty is several different things. The thing that really is remarkable about it is that it's basically an interdisciplinary think tank focused on art, and it approaches art from multiple perspectives. We have at the research institute what is effectively the Library of Congress for art. We have a vast collection of materials—primary and secondary—connected to visual art. We have a conservation institute that does projects all around the world—anything ranging from preservation of earthen architectural sites to projects connected to artworks made out of plastic, which is a highly friable material. And then we have a foundation that is actively making grants. And alongside all of that, we have the display of art in the museum.
The place of Getty in the world is to sort of be a repository of the human experience as expressed through the visual arts and a guardian of human experience as expressed through the visual arts. And that's a role that we perform—here's a trippy thought—whether people care about it or not. It matters whether people care about it and engage with it or not. It matters in and of itself.
TR: This is the year of PST ART: Art and Science Collide. Could you tell us about the initiative and about the efforts you've taken to promulgate this across Southern California and beyond?
KF: This is an event that has taken place two times in prior iterations, roughly on a five-year cycle. And through the Getty Foundation, we will choose a theme for each instantiation of this thing called PST ART, and then institutions can apply for support for exhibitions that connect to that theme. The exhibitions need to be deeply researched over the course of two, three, four years prior. Instantiations of PST ART have had to do with the LA art scene and with the connection between Latin America and Los Angeles on the art scene. This year's instantiation of PST ART has, as its theme, Art and Science Collide.
We have 70 different museums and institutions across Southern California that are participating in it. Fifty different galleries, hundreds and hundreds of different artists.
A number of the exhibitions are just mind-blowing. There are several that have been done in collaboration with Caltech and with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
TR: Do you see, as an output of this, technology working its way into artistic expression in different ways?
KF: So, there's a huge amount of anxiety, of course, in all sorts of realms, but no less so in the art realm about the implications of AI for artistic creation. On lots of levels, I'm sure you immediately can think about the question of authenticity. How important is the creator of a work of art?
Now, I would argue that historically it didn't really matter that much. A thousand years ago, 1,500 years ago, we weren't nearly as preoccupied with knowing who the creator of a given work of art was. Or, if someone was a great artist, it was considered a really good thing to copy that artist and to even sign your work of art with that artist's name. Our egos can no longer accommodate that, and we're now much, much more preoccupied with authorial authenticity. So, there's a lot of concern around AI and what it means for these questions. But at the same time, AI is being deployed in really interesting ways to be generative of forms of art that we haven't been able to imagine before.
TR: I want to ask about your trajectory and who influenced you, who you learned from, in terms of the various kinds of organizations and intellectual endeavors you've taken on.
KF: At the moment that I was entering university, a very important corpus of written material had, for the first time, been translated into English. And it was a collection of documents that had originally been written in Coptic, and they had been found in the Nag Hammadi Desert in Egypt. And after various peregrinations on the rare documents market, they had come into scholarly hands here in Claremont and had finally been translated into English. And what these things [turned out to be] were alternative Gospel accounts.
And this, for me, was such a great intellectual moment to realize, A, the world is not at all as I thought that it was. Not at all, not at all. Like, wow, OK! How about that? How much other stuff is there that we don't even know exists?
It also made me realize that if you learn languages, you have access to an understanding of material that you don't otherwise have access to. That was when I became interested in Coptic and also became interested in the study of Greek. And it made me realize that if you know what you're talking about, you have just as much a right as anybody else to have your interpretation of things.