Google Art Project

Google Art Project

"Visitor's Guide: How to use the site: Simply select a museum from the homepage and then either choose ‘Explore the museum’ or ‘View Artwork’. Once you are in the main site use the drop-down menus or the side info bar to navigate between artworks and museums. Finally create and share your own collections online."
"NYT: The greatly expanded second iteration of this online compilation of self-selected art museums and artworks was unveiled last week. It makes available images of more than 32,000 works in 31 mediums and materials, from the collections of 151 museums and arts organizations worldwide, forming a broad,

deep river of shared information, something like a lavishly illustrated art book fused with high-end open storage.. . .

One of the glories of the Google Art Project is that it is a collective, additive work in progress that allows any museum or art-related organization to join and upload as many — or as few — high-resolution images of artworks as it chooses. . . . 

In the meantime the grand potential of the project and of its collaborative structure is fully evident in the new version. In all, it ranges through several millenniums of art history and also across actual space in ways that boggle the mind, and it ushers in a new era of interconnected access both to world art and among the institutions that preserve it. It is light-years beyond the first version, which had its debut early last year and featured 17 participating museums from Europe and the United States and a selection of just over 1,000 works in a single medium — painting — that represented but a few centuries of Western art.

At the time the air was thick with wait-and-see caution. Now museums large and small from around the globe have jumped aboard, joining early adopters like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the National Gallery, London.

Some newcomers are similar in stature and location, including the Kunsthistoriches in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Others are much further afield in terms of geography or mission. There are major museums from Mexico City, Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan, Australia and Israel, as well as the new Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. There are several artist museums, including those dedicated to Edvard Munch (Oslo), Frida Kahlo (Mexico City), Norman Rockwell (Stockbridge, Mass.) and Fernando Botero (Bogotá, Colombia). And there are definite moments of weirdness. The Ayala Museum in Makati, the Philippines, has uploaded 15 images of painted dioramas depicting scenes from Philippine history. The 20-year-old Olympics Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland — the single Swiss participant — is displaying lots of fairly awful statues of athletes. . . . " read the complete article "An Online Art Collection Grows Out of Infancy", by Roberta Smith, New York Times  April 11, 2012
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