Art + Google = Happy

In the past decade museums and archives have struggled with how, and whether, to take their collections online. On the one hand, it's a great way to introduce people to a museum's collections and perhaps generate more visits in the long run. On the other, older collections deal with a possessiveness issue for older masterpieces (they don't want to release images for fear of illegal copies and they want people to come to see the works in person), and copyright issues and problems obtaining permission from owners for many of 19th century and nearly all 20th century work.

Some museums, like the National Gallery in London has a fantastic digital component. It's very easy to search for sitter, subject, artist, medium, and many high quality digital images are available frequently with well-written contextual essays. When I was in London I visited the museum almost every week and I use the digital gallery frequently for research. The British Museum site, on the other hand, is slow and clunky. You access museum objects via an antiquated search feature and results take (in internet terms) foreva! to load.

The other online route is through a new digital museum that pulls paintings from different collections and sorts them via country and artist. Good examples are Olga's Gallery and the Web Gallery of Art. Both galleries have impressive collections, but stop in the 19th century and are limited more or less to European works. They're lovely for research, but for my teaching I find that it's difficult to obtain images for slide shows (I use a lot of art in my lectures and teaching and find digital images generally easier to get and work with compared to traditional art slides. The problems with using WGA or Olga's Gallery images is in part a PowerPoint and Keynote issue - they are not accustomed to using the highest quality of images necessary for the study of art in the classroom. You just can't get the closeups). Artstor.org is a pay-for-use site that does a pretty good job of gathering art and material culture objects from all over the world. They make it easy to search, save your work, and export it to either PowerPoint or their on Offline Art Viewer which, though not as pretty as PP or Keynote, does a fantastic job with the images and allows for extraordinary zooming and panning. To the point where you can see brushstrokes or bare canvas, even woodgrain on many panel paintings. The downside is that the collections are limited (google image search often pulls up more, lower quality, images), and it's might expensive unless your institution has a subscription. Even then, I can only access them remotely for a certain number of days.

And now, google enters the fray with Google Art Project. The NYTimes reviewed the site this morning, which is how I found out about it. It's pretty incredible. It's also pretty limited (still buggy, slow in places, and literally limited in content in many ways), but like Google Books, has great potential.  I have not tried to download or use any of the images, but it's delightful for personal exploration. Because it's set up on a museum by museum organization, I get the impression of wandering through a digital museum, rather then flipping through search results. It's fast and very clean. IT doesn't have as high resolution on all images as say, artstor or WGA, but the zooming capabilities are much speedier and images resolve (well, most of them) quickly. Best of all, it's free.

For me, this would be fantastic for reviewing works I've seen, or previewing a museum's collections. It would also be a great place to send students for in-class projects. I think ArtStor has more to offer, but can be clunky, costs $$, and is still limited in terms of its collections. I'm not sure how usable the images are for slide shows, but they're wonderful for close personal study.