Google and 17 of the world’s greatest art museums have created a way to view art with no queues, no charges for entry tickets, no noisy and clumsy crowds. A free art world just for you, where you can roam 385 art museum halls and turn around 360 degrees to get a full perspective of the rooms (just like in Google Street View) while simply lying on your favorite sofa. You can zoom in to view the details of an artwork you are interested in, even if what you want to see is the detail of the painted ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, France. Moreover, you can become an art collector yourself, without any financial limitations on your collection. You can gather your own virtual art collection and invite your friends to see it, even extending your choices to Van Gogh, Pollok and Botticelli.
As the official webpage indicates, the Art Project is a unique collaboration between Google and some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.
The level of remarkable detail doesn’t extend to all the works, but in addition to their use of Street View technology, each museum picked out one painting that was digitized into a large gigapixel format that dramatically exceeds the resolution of a standard camera. So from this moment Edouard Manet`s painting “In the Conservatory” won`t be able to hide the slightest detail from your eyes.
Nelson Mattos, VP of Engineering at Google, said, on the Art Project`s presentation at Tate Britain museum, that the Project was another step towards the democratization of art. And this is true, since now even people from Africa and India who are not planning to visit the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in the near future will be able to explore its treasures and find out more about the history and author of each artwork.
And don’t worry, virtual museum visits won`t have bad influence on visitor numbers for real life museums. The records suggest that if you once see a painting on the internet and you liked it, you won`t miss a chance to see it in real life. And vice versa, if you visited the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid and were impressed by “The Bottle of Anís del Mono” by Juan Gris, you will want to have a look at it again elsewhere and share your delight with others.
Last week, the weather forecast was poor, so I stayed in and while comfortably hidden under my warm plaid, with my lovely cat and a cup of cocoa in reach, I went to ‘visit’ the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Later, friends will come round, and since we don’t have a vacation coming up anytime soon, we’ll take the virtual route and ‘visit’ the Museum Kampa in Prague and have a long evening of discussions. Have you already planned your bad weather weekend?
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