Whether art is an obsession or just a budding interest, Google's Art Project will entice you with easy access to the treasures of 17 amazing museums across the world
Google's Art Project is very much a work in progress, but it is already a mesmerising, world-expanding tool for selfeducation. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, and poke around some of the world's great museums all on your computer.
On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence, you can look at Botticelli's Birth of Venus almost inch by inch. It's nothing like standing before the real thing, but you can pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle. This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.
There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the Art Project (www.googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions. In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work—like Botticelli's Venus—for star treatment. These works have been painstakingly photographed for superhigh resolution.
The Museum of Modern Art selected Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's star painting is Bruegel's 'Harvesters' with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground.
In the case of Van Gogh's famous 'Bedroom', the star painting chosen by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was able to scrutinize the five framed artworks depicted on the chamber's walls: two portraits, one still life and two works, possibly on paper, that are so cursory they look like contemporary abstractions.
Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. The most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.
At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings, especially, as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works.
Another innovation of the Art Project is Google's adaptation of its Street View program for indoor use. This makes it possible, for example, to navigate through several of the spacious salons at Versailles gazing at ceiling murals—thanks to the 360-degree navigation—or to get a sharper, more immediate sense than any guidebook can provide of the light, layout and ambience of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
Keep in mind that usually only a few of the many, many works encountered on a virtual tour are available for high-res or super-high-res viewing. The Art Project has been hailed as a great leap forward in terms of the online art experience, which seems debatable, since most museums have spent at least the last decade—and quite a bit of money—developing Web access to works in their collections. On the site of the National Gallery, for example, you can examine the lush surface of Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus' with a zoom similar to the Art Project's. Still, Google offers a distinct and extraordinary benefit in its United Nations-like gathering of different collections under one technological umbrella, enabling easy online travel among them.
When you view a work by one artist at one museum, clicking on the link 'More works by this artist' will produce a list of all the others in the Art Project system. But some fine-tuning is needed here. Sometimes the link is missing, and sometimes it links only to other works in that museum. Other tweaks to consider: including the dates of the works on all pull-down lists, and providing measurements in inches as well as centimeters.
Despite the roster of world-class museums, there are notable omissions: titans like the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, not to mention most major American museums, starting with the National Gallery in Washington. Without specifying who turned it down, Google says that many museums were approached, that 17 signed on, and that it hopes to add more as the project develops.
This implies an understandable wait-and-see attitude from many institutions, including some of the participants. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, has made only one large gallery available—the large room of French Post-Impressionist works that kicks off its permanent collection displays—along with 17 paintings that are all, again, examples of 19th-century Post-Impressionism. (Oh, and you can wander around the lobby.)
On first glance this seems both unmodern in focus and a tad miserly, given that several museums offer more than 100 works and at least 15 galleries. But the Museum of Modern Art is being pragmatic. According to Kim Mitchell, the museum's chief communications officer, the 17 paintings "are among the few in our collection that do not raise the copyright-related issues that affect so many works of modern and contemporary art." In other words, if and when the Art Project is a clear success, the Modern will decide if it wants to spend the time and money to secure permission for Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon" and the like to appear on it.
This might also hold true for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which owns Picasso's "Guernica," but has so far limited its participation primarily to 13 paintings by the Cubist Juan Gris and 35 photographs from the Spanish Civil War.
In many ways this new Google venture is simply the latest phase of simulation that began with the invention of photography, which is when artworks first acquired second lives as images and in a sense, started going viral. Needless to say, Google's Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all.
Taking a walk through 17 world-famous museums is as simple as typing in a URL. At www.googleartproject.com,
Google has used a technology similar to Street View to allow you to ‘virtually’ visit these institutions. As a virtual visitor, you can walk the halls using on-screen arrows or quickly jump to a closer view of a particular artwork. Currently, a total of 385 gallery rooms and more than 1000 high resolution works by 486 different artists is available for viewing. Below: As demonstrated with Botticelli's Birth of Venus (displayed at the Uffizi in Florence), Google’s Art Project allows you to zoom in to less than a square inch of the artwork with certain selected pieces (using Google’s Gigapixel photo capturing technology) so that you can see every brush stroke, every speck of dust and every imperfection. This level of detail would normally only be available to the artist, his assistants, conservators or preparators.
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