Gates Buys Electronic Rights To Artworks -- Seattle Art Museum Images Will Be Shown At His $5 Million Home

Billionaire Bill Gates, building a mansion that will be a showcase of video entertainment, has bought electronic rights to works owned by the Seattle Art Museum.

For an undisclosed fee, the museum agreed to let Microsoft's chief executive convert some of its artworks into digital images for an electronic library Gates is accumulating.

The 1,000 images will be displayed on huge television screens that will be installed throughout Gates' new waterfront mansion in Medina. Gates also is looking for possible commercial uses of the images.

The museum declined to reveal the financial arrangement, but museum director Jay Gates (no relation to Bill Gates) said through a spokeswoman that the deal was fair to both sides.

The purchase gives another tantalizing glimpse of what will be found in Gates' mansion, one of the most elaborate homes this side of William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon. The inside of Gates' home will cover an area as big as a football field, but three-quarters of that will be underground. The cost is estimated at $5 million.

Just as newspaper tycoon Hearst scoured the globe in search of art, computer tycoon Gates has conducted a search for art in an exotic new form - captured on a computer disk. His goal for the house was 10,000 images of well-known paintings and photographs.

Gates started a company called Interactive Home Systems that has been negotiating with museums and individuals nationwide to buy electronic rights to artwork and still images. Any artwork that can be photographed can be digitized by a computer scanner.

Terry Lipscomb, general manager of Interactive Home Systems, which is wholly owned by Gates and employs 10 people, said the company is using Gates' new home to try out some new ideas.

The home, to be finished in 1993, will have video games and walls with high-definition television screens, a new technology that is not expected to be available to the public for years.

Lipscomb said it was up to Gates to reveal what will be in the house, but he did say that the private living quarters Gates will use within the complex would not be ostentatious. Elsewhere, the house - which will include such things as an entry pavilion, a reception hall to serve 120, a theater and a beach pavilion - will be filled with state-of-the-art video systems.

The TV screens will be hooked up to advanced computers tapping into a huge database containing images, he said. The company is researching ways to use the images and ways to make it easy for a person to call up data.

The goal, said Lipscomb, is to make the house "an interesting place to visit."

A visitor will be able to punch a button and view any work of art in the collection.

The deal with the Seattle Art Museum puts Gates in the vanguard of what many argue is a coming revolution in the use of computers. A technique called multimedia combines text with sound and images into a powerful tool for learning or entertainment. Using a multimedia encyclopedia, for example, a student could look up an opera singer, read her life's story and hear her sing by clicking on her face.

Gates, out of the country yesterday, has declined to discuss his collecting. He has not made public what images he has purchased.

Helen Abbott, the museum's publications and media manager, said Seattle's museum may be the first to close a deal with Gates. The deal, signed March 27, gives Interactive Home Systems nonexclusive rights to the artworks, plus the possibility of increasing the number later. The 1,000 images will be representative of the museum's collection of 18,000 objects, she said.

Abbott said the museum has sold the rights to its images before. Art-book publishers might pay the museum for the use of a photograph of a painting, for example.

Nationwide, museums generally charge from $200 to $500 to allow a book publisher to reproduce a painting in print.

Abbott said this was the first time the museum was approached about electronic rights.

"We're trying to feel our way through the process because it's so new," she said.

The museum was attracted to the idea because it offered a new way to bring art to the public, she said.

"Certainly we would like to think about it as a source of revenue, but it's so new for the museum and IHS, we don't know," said Abbott. "The idea is, this is a new way to communicate about art for a lot of people, especially for people who do not have direct access to a museum."

Interactive Home Systems has not yet selected which of the museum's objects it will digitize. In a later phase of the agreement, the company might focus on a particular collection, she said.

Gates will not be allowed to alter the images.

Through Interactive Home Systems, Gates is said to have contacted some of the major museums in the United States and abroad. He was reportedly in negotiations with the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns some of the world's most famous American paintings, including Grant Wood's "American Gothic" and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."

Some are wary of Gates' offers.

Nathan Benn, a celebrated photographer with National Geographic magazine, said he had long conversations with representatives of Interactive Home Systems and concluded that the company was not being forthcoming about the commercial possibilities of digitized images.

Benn said photographers should get royalties for each use of their digitized images.

"I'm convinced this is a huge commercial market," Benn said of the digital market. "I'm convinced it will dwarf the market of the printed still image. Gates realizes that. I admire his vision of that, but I don't like the way he's going about it."