Google’s Art Project Debuts With Virtual Access To 17 Art Museums

In February 2011, Google unveiled its groundbreaking Art Project--a unique collaboration with some of the world’s prestigious art museums in nine countries. Seventeen museums* worked with Google over the past 18 months to produce a website that enables users to discover and view more than 1,000 artworks online in extraordinary detail. The site can be explored at www.googleartproject.com.

The partnership involved taking a selection of extremely high-resolution images of

famous artworks, as well as collating more than 1,000 other images into one site. It also included capturing 360-degree tours of individual galleries using Street View "indoor" technology. With this unique project, anyone anywhere in the world can log in to learn about the history and artists behind a huge number of works. Each of the museums worked in extensive collaboration with Google, providing expertise

Van Gogh’s The Starry Night

and guidance on every step of the project, from choosing which collections to feature; to advising on the best angle to capture photos; to what kind of information should accompany the artwork.

Works of art, representing 486 artists from around the world, included in the project range from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry, to impressionist works by Manet and Cezanne to Byzantine iconography. Museum interiors are also featured from the ceilings of Versailles to ancient Egyptian temples.

Each of the museums worked in extensive collaboration with Google, providing expertise and guidance on every step of the project, from choosing which collections to feature, to advising on the best angle to capture photos, to determining what kind of information should accompany the artwork. Each museum selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution, or "gigapixel" photo-capturing technology.**

An example is the Museum of Modern Art's gigapixel photo of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889) shown above. Each image contains around 7 billion pixels, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye. The gigapixel image of The Starry Night is accompanied by a MoMA-produced video that features visitors' points of view of the painting.

In addition, museums provided images for a selection totaling more than 1,000 works of art.*** The resolution of these images, combined with a custom-built zoom viewer, allows art-lovers to discover minute aspects of paintings they may never have seen up close before.

In the indoor Street View feature, users can move around galleries virtually, selecting works of art that interest them and clicking to discover more or diving into the high resolution images, where available. The information panel allows users to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist, and watch related YouTube videos.

The Create an Artwork Collection feature allows users to save specific views of any of the 1,000 artworks and build their own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared.

In assessing the Google Art Project in her February 8 review, noted New York Times art critic Roberta Smith says that the “Google’s Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all. 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. These earlier iterations — while never more than the next best thing — have been providing pleasure for more than a century through art books, as postcards, posters and art-history-lecture slides. For all that time they have been the next best thing to being there. Now the next best thing has become better, even if it will never be more than next best,” Smith concludes.

Citiesandculture concurs. Being able to sit at a computer and visually travel through the museums gives a feeling of almost being there—and a great sense of exhilaration at seeing some of the world’s best art from the comfort of home.

*Participating Museums: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington, DC; The Frick Collection, New York; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musuem of Modern Art, New York; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Museum Kampa, Prague; National Gallery, London; Palace of Versailles, France; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Tate Britain, London; Uffizi Gallery, Florence; and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

** Gigapixel Artworks for each museum

*** The Art Project in numbers:

11 Cities, 9 Countries

17 Museums

17 ‘gigapixel’ pictures

385 gallery rooms

486 artists

1061 high res artwork images

More than 6,000 Street View ‘panoramas’

                                                                                                                        2/20/2011