The Google Art Project

Please click on the title to get to the web site!

I get the Art Knowledge news letter several times a week. As I scroll through the different painting and articles, looking for something of interest, I spotted this link. googleartproject.com

On occasion, Google does something wonderful, something no one else would think of, this is one of those times.

NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art, along with 16 other art museums from the United States, Europe, and Russia, is collaborating with Google on the Art Project, a website that enables users to discover and view more than 1,000 artworks online in extraordinary detail. The site launched today and can be explored at googleartproject.com. Over the last 18 months, Google worked with a range of museums, including four from the United States: MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington. 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 place. It also included capturing 360-degree tours of individual galleries using Street View "indoor" technology. With this unique project, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to learn about the history and artists behind a huge number of works, at the click of a mouse. 
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. MoMA's gigapixel photo is of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889). 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. In addition, museums provided images for a selection totalling 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. The gigapixel image of The Starry Night is accompanied by a MoMA-produced video that features visitors' points of view of the painting.

If you like art or want to know more, this is an easy way to see great works of art on your computer screen!

and now for a viewing cup of coffee

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