Google Art Project is one of my favorite things. You can virtually visit more than 150 museums around the world, although you are just looking at a subset of each museum's artworks. All together, though, there are more than 30,000 works of art to discover, and many of them are in super-high-def (gigapixel) format. In other words, they are really beautiful. Also, via Google Street View technology, you can virtually "walk" through many of the galleries, so you can get a feeling for the setting of the artworks. Of course some of the museums, like the Palace of Versailles, are arguably more interesting for their architecture and interior design than for the artworks they contain.
Endeavors like this put us on the path to an idealized future, where all the world's knowledge and cultural capital is freely available and accessible online. We can't all travel everywhere we would like to visit. Google Art Project offers the opportunity for really rich encounters with art and the institutions that house it.
Endeavors like this put us on the path to an idealized future, where all the world's knowledge and cultural capital is freely available and accessible online. We can't all travel everywhere we would like to visit. Google Art Project offers the opportunity for really rich encounters with art and the institutions that house it.
